You can't just start practicing law without a license, you'll ruin somebody's life; they'll assume you, or the computer, knows what is going on, when in fact you just want Free Dollars.
I don't want Dr. iPad Joe who spent a grand total of 15 minutes learning how to use ChatGPT making legal, medical, engineering, or other important decisions for me or the place I live.
Now, I am of course free to use ChatGPT as a private person to "come up with my own legal arguments", but should a company be allowed to sell me a ChatGPT lawyer? No. They shouldn't be allowed to sell me unlabelled asbestos products either.
I know we all hate regulations, but some of them exist for a reason, and the reason is Bad Shit happened before we had regulations.
As the AI gets better people will trust it with more and more kinds of cases and cases with more increased complexity. If people want to pay for a real licensed lawyer they are still able to do so.
AI is just informed search, a dwarf sitting on shoulders of human knowledge. There were medical "expert systems" in 2000s, yet we still have doctors.
In my understanding, in most cases AI will be a glorified assistant, not an authoritative decision-maker. Otherwise in collides head-on with barriers and semis. I won't trust such system even with a parking ticket, yet alone my life.
We're just at the top of a hype-cycle now. AI can do new things, but not as well as we dream or hope.
Any kind of assistant can make mistakes. But a human assistant can be made to show their work and explain their reasoning to check their output. If ChatGPT says "this thing is totally legal" or "don't worry about that rash", how am I to validate it's "reasoning"? How do I know where it's drawing it's inference from?
ChatGPT: "Your honor, that couldn't have been me, as I drive a red Mustang, not a blue minivan, and was in Nepal climbing a mountain at the time.."
Defendant: "Your honor, that couldn't have been my, as I drive a red Mustang, not a blue minivan, and was in Nepal climbing a mountain at the time."
Prosecutor: "Um, this photo clearly shows your face in this blue minivan, and there's no evidence you've been to Nepal."
Judge: "I'm holding you in contempt of court, and sentence you to 7 days in jail for perjury."
8<----
I don't think the argument is that AI is never allowed to represent someone in court; just that before it happens, a sufficient amount of vetting must be done. At a bare minimum, the legal AI needs to know not to lead the defendant to perjure themselves.
I think the way forward might be an arbitration case, where they pay an actual legal expert in the right position to make binding decisions outside of the context of the normal law system.
In voluntary arbitration, you can bend the rules a lot more than in an actual court case.
ChatGPT lies. It makes up facts, sources, and nonsense arguments.
Lying to a judge is generally not a good idea. You can go from traffic ticket to contempt of court real fast if you start lying in court.
ChatGPT also assumes you're speaking the truth. If you ask it about a topic and say "that's wrong, the actual facts are..." then it'll change argumentation to support your position. You probably don't want your legal representation to become your prosecutor when they use the right type of phrasing.
> Lying to a judge is generally not a good idea. You can go from traffic ticket to contempt of court real fast if you start lying in court.
Then I suppose that's just the risk the defendant takes, isn't it? Let people use ChatGPT, if the rope they're given ends up hanging enough people, that'll be the end of that, won't it?
Also, everyone is ignoring the possibility that this same person could've had ChatGPT generate a script (general outline of arguments, "what do I say if asked this" type of stuff), memorized it, and used that to guide his self-defense. Fundamentally, no difference. No one would've known, and no one would've objected.
To me, this move is less "oh we need to protect people from getting bad legal advice from a robot" and "we're not even gonna let this thing be used a single time in court to keep our job from being automated."
> Fundamentally, no difference. No one would've known, and no one would've objected.
I'm not a legal professional but it seems obvious to me that there is a fundamental difference, namely the one you describe just before that sentence. The whole legal system is built around and under the assumption that all kinds of people want to trick it, and judges tend to be allergic to this kind of reasoning. Memorizing legal arguments and getting live legal advise from earphones in your glasses are not the same thing. Besides,even lawyers are advised not to defend themselves in court, and it would be generally very bad advise for anyone to do so.
> Memorizing legal arguments and getting live legal advise from earphones in your glasses are not the same thing.
Only in the strictest sense. Let's say the person memorizing ChatGPT's directions handles their case in the exact same manner as if it was being relayed to them live (i.e., the set of statements/questions from the judge lined up perfectly with what ChatGPT presented in its script). What then? Same outcome, different delivery method. We're kind of splitting hairs with the "live legal advise" thing. The defendant could bring a pile of law books with him and consult those without anyone blinking an eye. The objection seems to boil down to "well OK, if you want to represent yourself you better not consult an intelligent system to help you form your defense." Why not though? Seems more about job protection than anything else.
> Besides,even lawyers are advised not to defend themselves in court, and it would be generally very bad advise for anyone to do so.
And I say: let people discover the downside of using ChatGPT for defense if it's so inept. Bad outcomes are the best way to prevent widespread usage, not pre-emptive bans in the interest of keeping people from shooting themselves in the foot.
Honest tangent that I'm dying to find an answer for. Is the assumption of truthful prompts something openAI decided should be there, or is the assumption something very deeply baked into this sort of language model? Could they make an argumentative, opinionated, arrogant asshole version of chatGPT if they simply let it off its leash?
>Lying to a judge is generally not a good idea. You can go from traffic ticket to contempt of court real fast if you start lying in court.
If you knowingly lie because ChatGPT told you to that's on you. If you said something that you believed was true because ChatGPT said it to you then that's not perjury, it's just being wrong.
> You probably don't want your legal representation to become your prosecutor when they use the right type of phrasing.
When the worst case scenario is having to pay the parking fine, it might be worth taking this risk to avoid paying a lawyer.
Yeah, but notebooks are allowed in court and you could spill water on your notebook and confuse an 8 for a 0 and then read it out to court and it would be a lie.
Lying to judges is bad, so notebooks should be banned. Likewise, anything typed should be banned because we could have hit the wrong key, causing you to lie to the judge.
> How does failing to get rid of a traffic ticket ruin someone's life?
The downside of contesting a traffic ticket is not “failing to get rid of the ticket”. The ticket amount amounts to a no contest plea bargain offer, not the maximum penalty for the offense, not to mentiom the potential additional penalties for violating court rules.
Unpaid traffic tickets are probably many people's gateway to their first arrest warrant. Then once in the system it is hard to escape. It is a real thing.
Then once this process starts you automatically get
* Suspended driver’s license
* Ineligible to renew your driver’s license
* Ineligible to register your vehicle
* Vehicle being towed and impounded
* Increased insurance premiums
Traffic tickets and parking tickets are two different things though. Unpaid parking ticket is unlikely to get you arrested anywhere, but an unpaid speeding ticket will eventually lead to some pretty unpleasant consequences which yes, might include arrest(to bring you in front of the judge and explain yourself).
For instance, as I discovered recently going through this process myself - here in UK when applying for British citizenship you have to disclose any court orders against you. Now here's a thing - if you were given a ticket for speeding, accepted it and paid it then that's it, no harm done. If it's less than 3 tickets in the last 5 years then you don't even need to list it on the application form.
However, if you went to court to contest it and lost, then you now have a court order against you - and that's an automatic 3 year ban on British citizenship applications, and even after that you always have to list it as a thing that happened and it can be used to argue you are of "bad character" and be used to deny you the citizenship.
So yes, failing to get rid of a traffic ticket(in the court of law) can absolutely ruin your life.
How is this known upfront? I've lived for over a decade in this country without knowing this, until I actually applied for my citizenship last year. I'm just lucky I never went to court to contest a speeding ticket(because I never got any) or I could have screwed myself over without even knowing.
Also define "small group" - nearly 200k people apply for British citizenship annually, and I bet most of them have no idea contesting a traffic ticket can cost them a chance at becoming citizens.
I used to drive a cab and people would tell me why they were in the cab quite often.
My favorite was this guy who got a ticket on a bicycle for not having a headlight, moved out of state and ten years later had his car impounded for driving without a license because they apparently suspended it for getting (or, more correctly, not paying) a ticket he got on a bicycle.
I’m guessing he never tried changing his license to the new state because Arizona licenses are good until you’re 65.
I think the stakes are not that high in this particular application. I see it as something akin to Turbotax, it helps you navigate a difficult environment but you should also exercise judgement to not screw everything up.
Or do what the rest of the world does and make the (tax) environment simpler for the average person.
Turbotax, Quicken, etc, is a great warning, those companies lobby to increase complexity of trivial matters (like personal tax returns). The same companies will do this with 'trivial' legal matters, and the only way forward is to buy their software.
Wait until you hear about this Electric Car company, using real people to beta test untried self driving software, on Real roads against other drivers and pedestrians...
I find the need for lawyers a tragedy. Interactions with the judicial system are often some of the most important events in a person’s life. The fact that it’s necessary to pay someone hundreds or thousands of dollars an hour to help navigate the arcane process is sad and shouldn’t be necessary. It would be one thing if laws were meaningfully written down, so that anyone could read the statutes and build their own argument, but the laws are not written down in a way that has meaning unless you are willing to wade through centuries of case law.
Is the need to use an expert the issue or rather the price point? Why would it be wrong to avail yourself of someone else's expertise (and people use lawyers in non-case law jurisdictions, too)?
Not sure anyone really would want to operate on themselves (because the need for a surgeon in an important event in their life is somehow "wrong").
Where I live, insurance for civil litigation is actually pretty cheap. For criminal cases, my understanding is that in a lot of places you will be given a lawyer if you cannot pay for one as a defendant.
In Denmark there is "fri process" that will ensure a lawyer is provided when really needed and you can't afford it – my guess is that other countries have similar systems.
> It may differ in your country, but it is unlikely.
It differs in my country, and it is very likely. The US follows an anglo approach to law. No country in the EU follows that – I do understand that it is the easiest to assume that other countries work like you expect, though not very productive.
I assume you mean a US Attorney. OTOH, US Attorneys and Federal Public Defenders (in the judicial districts that have them, its a district by district decision under the governing law) may not be the most knowledgeablr about this since most cases are tried in state court and the federal indigent defense delivery system is very different from most state systems, both in structural model and caseload.
We all use technology to treat ourselves in lieu of a surgeon all the time, whether it's a Google search, a plaster, or cough medicine or whatever. Are you going to give up all the advances that differentiate your situation from that of someone in say, 17th century Europe, because an expert should do it because they're an expert?
No thanks. I'll take advances that make things easy enough to avoid experts wherever I can get it and leave the bloodlettings (which, with lawyers, will be from your bank account) to others.
That’s not what he said. The key word there was _operate_, not _use a band–aid_. I wouldn’t recommend trying to take out your own appendix; it’s a really bad idea.
Yea, but he was already a professional practicing surgeon! The rest of us should not attempt this; we should hire a professional. It is similarly preferable to hire the services of a professional lawyer most of the time.
You've cherry-picked a procedure out of the thousands possible. The reason it's preferable to use a surgeon for things like appendicectomy is because there isn't a technology to do it for yourself or treat it before it needs surgery. There are, however, other treatments available for other maladies that mean you don't need a surgeon or won't need a surgeon, and thus surgeons can concentrate on other stuff that we don't have better, cheaper ways of taking care of.
If AI can take care of parking tickets and small claims, perhaps speed up the process by making lawyers quicker at their jobs et cetera et cetera, then it's all good. If it puts pressure on lawmakers to simplify the law, all the better.
"need to use an expert the issue or rather the price point"
Both, but for most people it is simply the price point, so this is the more important issue.
I think no one has a problem, that when setting up complicated contracts with multiple persons involved, a legal expert is necessary, but for very basic things, it should not be, but rather the laws should be more clear and simple.
>Not sure anyone really would want to operate on themselves (because the need for a surgeon in an important event in their life is somehow "wrong").
Not operate, but since over here in Europe just about any piece of paper passes as a prescription, I tend to print my own. (Most people don't know this, but EU pharmacies are required to accept prescriptions from other EU countries. There's no standard format or verification procedure, so forgery is trivial even if your country has a more secure domestic system)
What's the point of going to (or even calling) a doctor for an antibiotics prescription? It's not like they're going to perform blood tests before prescribing. Want some Cialis for the weekend? Why go to a doctor? You can just pull up the contraindications on Google. Why bother doctor shopping for Ozempic? Just print your own prescription.
Pretty sure, sometimes a doctor might know more than you on a prescription or their educated guess on which antibiotic is appropriate is better than yours, for example.
You do realize that antibiotics are completely ineffective against a cold? You're wrecking your digestive system and risking antibiotic resistance for nothing. If your doctor is prescribing antibiotics, either they're a terrible doctor, or they're a bad doctor and you're a worse patient.
Yes, sorry. That's just language barrier raising it's head. What I meant was strep throat, obviously there's not much of a point in taking antibiotics for a viral infection.
I don't need a doctor to inspect my tonsils, I have access to a phone with a flashlight.
And for what it's worth, I think I've taken antibiotics twice in the past 4 years. Always according to the instructions on the packaging.
At least in Switzerland, I always had to have blood tests done before the doctor would prescribe anti-biotics. The core issue you have is with the doctor prescribing things willy-nilly.
That might be a thing in some EU countries, but it's certainly not the norm across the EU. You can still buy antibiotics without a prescription in many EU countries, for example in Spain it's entirely dependent on the pharmacist.
> Is the need to use an expert the issue or rather the price point? Why would it be wrong to avail yourself of someone else's expertise (and people use lawyers in non-case law jurisdictions, too)?
Even needing an expert at all is an issue - the law that governs society needs to be accessible to members of society, long before they reach the point of litigation.
It might also be a function of legal tradition/system. In some places laws are quite easy to read for me, in others I find it much tougher (as a non-lawyer).
In part I understand what you mean. I think it is extremely important that courtroom procedure doesn’t get so complex that it is impossible for an individual to cope with. In practice a lot of judges go out of their way to make self–representation possible. However, I don’t think that having professional lawyers represents a tragedy. Specialization is very important, and we would all be worse off without it.
Teaching is even more important, and we use professional teachers. Building a house is also an important moment in our lives, and most people would do well to accept the advice of a professional architect.
I disagree, I think for important things like the rules that govern us (i.e. the legal system) we need to be able to fully understand and interact with them. Imagine if voting was so complicated that you had to pay someone to vote for you!
Likewise, taxes should be simple and understandable and doable. Don't undersell our importance as citizens; We should demand more because we deserve well!
Yeah but the rules that govern our lives in society shouldn't need a phd to understand.
There are often daily situations where both citizens and police don't know really know what the law is.
Reform is proven to be really hard. But that's the tragedy.
For instance taxes shouldn't really be more complicated then filling in a simple automated form. Also for businesses. And it should really be the burden of the government taxing that it's all clear. But it's not and it's a mess and the burden is put on the people.
This is by design. Governmental systems are "captured" by special interests and made intentionally obtuse and complex as a barrier to entry. Lawyers and judges are a guild that works to make the law complex and extract rents from the productive economy. Over 1/3 of the U.S. Congress are attorneys as well.
I honestly don't think there is such a malicious intent behind it. Perhaps in some small instances.
Generally, the fact of the matter is simply that law is highly complex and the way it evolves is almost always by creating new laws, not getting rid of old ones. That's unfortunate obviously, but just like you don't just rewrite the Linux kernel, you can't just reset the legal foundation.
Some, and maybe most, of the complexity is organic. But there are specific instances, like the tax code, that have been kept intentionally complex at the bequest of special interest groups.
And of course, laws are made mostly by lawyers. So they don't have much of an incentive to change things.
Professional advocates aren't a result of any specific legal system - if I'm at risk of having my life's savings and achievements summarily destroyed then I want someone of waaaaay above average verbal and emotional intelligence, who is thinking clearly and not under any pressure themselves, explaining why that shouldn't happen.
There is a problem where the laws so complex and numerous it is no longer practical to understand them or follow them all. People have a bias and don't seem very good at separating "good idea in the current context" from "thing that should be legally required". Let alone navigating the complexity of the phrase "cost benefit analysis". Anyone who lives life while obeying all laws to the letter is at a serious disadvantage to the average human - although since it is impossible to know what all the laws are it is unlikely anyone could do this.
But that arcanery isn't what drives the need for lawyers. You'd have to be crazy to engage with something as powerful and erratic as a legal system on your own. And crazy people do frequently represent themselves already.
"The person challenging a speeding ticket would wear smart glasses that both record court proceedings and dictate responses into the defendant's ear from a small speaker. The system relied on a few leading AI text generators, including ChatGPT and DaVinci."
I.e its equivalent of a person effectively studying the actual law and then representing themselves in court, just in a more optimal manner.
Even if it fails, it was supposed to be something trivial like a speeding ticket, because after all, this is a test.
And funny enough, the answer of will it work has already been answered. If law firms believed it was bullshit, they would just put a very good attorney on that case and disprove it. Barring it from entry with threat of jailtime pretty much proves that they are full of shit and they know it.
> I.e its equivalent of a person effectively studying the actual law and then representing themselves in court, just in a more optimal manner.
It's not equivalent at all. ChatGPT and DaVinci have not "studied the law" in the same way as any human would.
> If law firms believed it was bullshit, they would just put a very good attorney on that case and disprove it. Barring it from entry with threat of jailtime pretty much proves that they are full of shit and they know it.
This is a traffic ticket case. He's not up against Sullivan & Cromwell, he's up against some local prosecutor. I'm sure if some white shoe law firm were being paid hundreds of thousands to defend a case against a guy using ChatGPT, they'd be fine with it.
Even though we have an adversarial system, the state can't just let ordinary folk hang themselves with cheap half-baked "solutions". It would be unjust/bad press (delete as appropriate to your level of cynicism). That's why we have licensing requirements, etc.
So what if I just decided of my own accord to use ChatGPT and train it myself? Or someone on GitHub made a fully trained version of it available in a Docker container, for free?
Then nobody would issue legal threats to you for selling "Robot Lawyer" services.
But you probably wouldn't get permission to use Google Glass in the courtroom either, so you'd have to commit your legal arguments to memory as well as hoping the AI hadn't ingested too much "freeman of the land" nonsense...
What's the difference between self representation and practicing law without a license - is there an exemption for unlicensed practitioners when they are performing on their own behalf, or this is a distinct category somehow?
Think of chatgpt as a search engine. Does it matter if you use a search engine before the trial, and perhaps bringing a big ass binder to the court with all possible responses, or you do it during the trial?
And any lawyer that can go against gpt3 and win will be a net benefit to the whole law community, showing that lawyers are worth the money.
I see that as a tool, I'm not sure why it's presented as "AI being the lawyer".
You're allowed to represent yourself in court, most of the time (and for parking ticket I'm pretty sure) you have no obligation to have a lawyer. Now if you want to pay for a tool that helps you represent yourself better, why not?
I had the same thought, but I guess if you're paying someone for legal counsel then they need to be held responsible for the service they are giving, however they give it. That's qualitatively different from buying a legal textbook and advising yourself from it, since you are the one deriving counsel to yourself from generally available information.
> I know we all hate regulations, but some of them exist for a reason, and the reason is Bad Shit happened before we had regulations.
That's not the only reason regulations exist.
And most 'Bad Shit' can already be dealt with via existing rules, instead of specific new regulations. But making new rules sounds good to the voters and can also be a powergrab.
This position means nobody gets adequate legal representation unless they are wealthy, so essentially just 'screw poor people'.
Who's more likely to get out of a wrongful charge? A wealthy millionaire spending $1,000/hour on fancy lawyers or a poor guy who's public defender had 1 hour to look into his case?
AI levels the playing field, and anyone campaigning against wants poor people to continue to get railroaded.
> Here's how it was supposed to work: The person challenging a speeding ticket would wear smart glasses that both record court proceedings and dictate responses into the defendant's ear from a small speaker. The system relied on a few leading AI text generators, including ChatGPT and DaVinci.
- Recording court proceedings is already a big no in many countries around the world.
- Licensed activity is licensed activity. IBM Watson did not practice medicine it provided advisory information to licensed doctors, the onus of the decision is with the doctors. Much in the same way Joshua Browder could have done better due diligence and concluded that he could create a service to advise lawyers but could not create a service in replacement of lawyers.
- Joshua probably already knew all of this and is trying to advertise and/or gather funding for his company.
The official record taken word for word by the stenographer? Why would you need to challenge that? Are you implying something that's more than one in a million?
Don't be vague on purpose. Say what you're implying.
> Court cases aren't about the common occurrences.
Usually they still are. But I'm talking about things being very rare among court cases. Do you think there is a systemic problem of false court transcripts? And I really don't think such a thing is the reason not to allow recording.
That oversight is a big part of why the court reporter exists, and has existed since long before recording technology was invented. Keeping things the same is not a refusal of oversight.
Its too bad they didn’t have a competent AI lawyer they could hace used to review their plan for gaping holes like violating the state unauthorized practice of law statute and local courtroom rules.
If they had, they could have saved thrmselves a lot of trouble, or designed a less-illegal publicity stunt.
Here’s a Twitter thread where a lawyer used their service for a few items. The results are significantly subpar. The noise about criminal referrals is just cover for the fact that their service was so bad, in my opinion.
I don't see the problem as long as the actual lawyer can intervene when necessary.
If ChatGPT did something wrong, that lawyer would still be on the hook for deciding to continue using this tool so responsibility/liability/authenticity is not a problem.
I get that they want to make some kind of subscription service to replace lawyers with AI (a terribly dystopian idea in my opinion, as only the rich would then have access to actual lawyers) but just like Tesla needs someone in the drivers seat to overrule the occasional phantom breaking and swerving, you need an actual lawyer for your proof of concept cases if you're going to go AI in a new area.
You'd also need a fast typist to feed the record into ChatGPT of course, because you can't just record lawsuits, but anyone with a steno keyboard should be able to keep up with a court room.
> a terribly dystopian idea in my opinion, as only the rich would then have access to actual lawyers
The rich don't go to jail already. The crypto scammer paid a huge bail and got out on his private jet. That, to me, is far more dystopian than a cheap tool to help people appeal traffic tickets.
You're conflating a few different things. Being able to pay bail so you don't have to be in jail while you wait for your trial doesn't get you out of having a trial, and has nothing to do with needing lawyers.
What the parent was referring to is the fact that if AI starts to consume the low-end (starting with traffic tickets), actual lawyers for trials will become even more expensive, and thus poorer people will actually fare worse because they will lose their already-limited access to human lawyers. Yes, their case might get handled with less hassle and cheaper, but the quality of the service is not -better-, it's just cheaper/easier.
It seems to me you're the only one conflating things? Grandparent didn't say anything about getting out of having a trial, or about needing lawyers. They're talking about how people with money can use it to avoid spending time in jail, and gave a perfectly valid example of someone rich doing exactly that.
That is pretty bad example. In theory, bail should be affordable to the individual person. It is meant to be insurance that you come back for actual court date.
The outrage there is bails being set to unaffordable sizes for poor people. OP was picking out the case where bail functioned as intended.
Or maybe we only end up using lawyers when they're actually needed, and they become less costly for things like criminal trials. Think on the doctor whose routine cold and flu visits are replaced by an AI. Now they have a lot more time and bandwidth to handle patients who actually need physician care.
We can't just assume it's going to go the worst way. Neither outcome is particularly more likely, and the human element is by far the most unpredictable.
To wit: I was listening to a report yesterday on NPR about concierge primary care physicians. The MD they were interviewing was declining going that direction because they saw being a doctor as part duty and felt concierge medicine went against that.
Well, because there are now e.g. two cases of murder instead of only one, and the second one was entirely preventable? Oh, right, the law is not about the populace's lives and well-being, how silly of me to assume that.
You didn't answer my questions. Do you think it would decrease the odds of reoffending if they didn't get bail?
If it doesn't, then it's two crimes either way, just timed differently. And after the policy settled in it would have negligible impact on the crime rate.
Also if you're doing sentencing for two crimes at once you can give a longer punishment for the first crime and get them off the street longer.
Yes, it would decrease the odds, provided that after walking out of jail the probability of a criminal to commit a crime (that includes his intent to reoffend but also possible changes in the environment that happened during his time in jail that reduce his possibilities to do so) is less than before walking in, because they wouldn't get the chance to reoffend immediately.
I don't assume that someone coming out of a sentence is less likely to commit a crime. Isn't it often the opposite, because the US is so bad at rehabilitation?
Then you should argue for "shoot at sight" or "lifetime sentences/electric chair for everything", shouldn't you?
But no, the probability does decreases since not every ex-jailed becomes a repeated offender; also, some people die during the sentence... the probability does go down, for many small reasons compounded together.
> Then you should argue for "shoot at sight" or "lifetime sentences/electric chair for everything", shouldn't you?
Not unless I'm a robot programmed to prevent recidivism at all costs. Why are you even asking this?
> But no, the probability does decreases since not every ex-jailed becomes a repeated offender
...and not everyone released before their trial becomes a repeat offender.
> some people die during the sentence
Is that a significant effect? I don't think most sentences are long enough for that to make a big difference, and I don't think preventing a single crime per lifetime, at most, is enough reason to keep people locked up for the lengthy pre-trial process.
I assume that the original comment was about how someone can get could pretty much red-handed for battery and assault/home violence but then instead of getting put into pre-trial/provisional detention (yes, you can get locked up even before being judged guilty, outrageous), they are just allowed to go because eh, why bother.
I could run the actual statistics for my district’s Court and tell you the percentage of reoffending while on bond, but in my experience a number approaching 40%, of people out on felony bonds, are re-arrested for additional felony conduct.
Every time I see this "traffic ticket" thing, it usually looks like
1) The driver was actually speeding
and
2) The driver is trying to get off on a technicality
Is that the case?
In the US do you get "points" on your driving license so that if you are caught speeding several times in the space of a couple of years you get banned?
In the UK being caught mildly speeding (say doing 60 in a 50), in the course of 3 years it's typically
Same in the UK, you have to get lifts or taxis everywhere, unless you live in big cities (London has great public transport, but so does New York. The weekly bus that my sister gets doesn't really help her to travel to work as dozens of different schools all over the county)
It's a very good reason not to speed.
So it's just a fine that Americans get for speeding?
Are fines at least proportional to wealth? Or can a rich people speed without problem as saving 10 minutes on their journey is worth the $100 fine even if it was guaranteed they got one?
(In the UK speed is almost entirely enforced by cameras, not by police cars which are rarely seen on roads. Removes any bias the cop might have -- maybe the cop has it in for young tesla drivers so pulls them over, but lets the old guy in a pickup go past)
> So it's just a fine that Americans get for speeding?
Well, things vary from state to state. But there is definitely a point system in place for excessive speeding, speeding in a school zone, passing a school bus at any speed, stuff like that. In a lot of places you can be arrested for reckless driving, with varying levels of what defines "reckless." Virginia is notorious for their speeding laws. Speeding in excess of 20mph of the posted limit or in excess of 80mph regardless of limit (e.g. 81 in a 65) is what they consider reckless driving and it's a misdemeanor that could potentially (but not likely) give you a one year jail sentence.
In the US you get a fine and you get points against you. Points cause your auto insurance to go up. And too many results in restricted or a suspended license. Which doesn't prevent people from driving but usually causes them to drive very conservatively so as not to get caught.
And the parent is correct the much of the US is set up for people to drive so much so that being draconian isn't practical. And it's something to keep in mind that any given individual didn't decide that's how the place they live in is setup.
No, fines are not proportional to wealth (at least in most states). They're either flat fees or pegged to speed. Points on license as well, so ~3 tickets inside a year and you lose your license or have to take a course to keep it.
Most tickets are given by live officers. Cameras do exist, but typically only in dense urban areas. Which opens another can of worms, as police are biased.
We also have lists of secondary offenses the officer can cite only after citing you for speeding (or some other primary offense). Things like a failed light bulb, or some other minor safety issue. These are disproportionately used against PoC.
In the US, a small percentage of people drive completely insane.
If going 75mph on a highway that is 65mph or 70mph someone will fly past going a 100mph.
Those are the people that get tickets. Otherwise, it is pretty difficult to even get pulled over.
I have only been pulled over twice in my life and not in 20 years. I think police departments have cut back quite a bit on police trying to rack up traffic tickets.
The fine is not the issue. The whole process is a massive waste of your time.
True as far as it goes, but bear in mind that a huge proportion of the population speeds routinely. So enforcing the law doesn't feel equitable; the rule of law already doesn't exist on the roads.
For traffic tickets, it is often possible to go to court and have the judge offer a reduced fine for pleading guilty or no contest (you don't admit guilt, but you don't plead innocence and accept the punishment).
Most people, when they want to fight such tickets, think they can argue their way out of it. Whereas the judge and officers simply just want to get the hearings over with. They do hundreds of such hearings a week and have heard it all before. So, the judge will tell the courtroom that they can get a reduction and how to get it. Sadly, the defendants are anxious, have been mentally preparing themselves for a fight, and are in an unfamiliar environment so they tend to get tunnel vision and choose to plead 'not guilty'. They inevitably loose.
If you ever find yourself in such a situation, pay close attention to what the judge offers everyone before the hearings begin. If they don't offer such a bargain, when it is your time to appear before the judge you can ask "would the court consider a reduction in exchange for a plea of no contest?" It doesn't hurt to ask.
The US is similar, but we also have other dynamics. Some municipalities rely on traffic tickets for revenue, so they have a perverse incentive to create more infractions. Notable examples are automated ticketing at red light leading to shorter yellows[0], and speed traps where a small town on a highway sets unreasonably low speed limits[1].
If that's the case, why involve money in it? About a third of people who are arrested cannot afford bail, while if you are rich (maybe through crime), you can pay it. Of course bail is a mechanism for differential treatment between rich and poor in the judicial system.
Right, the UK generally doesn't have cash bail, and the most recent noteworthy example where cash bail was used (Julian Assange) the accused did not in fact surrender and those who stumped up the money for bail lost their money, suggesting it's just a way for people with means to avoid justice.
The overwhelming majority of cases bailed in the UK surrender exactly as expected, even in cases where they know they are likely to receive a custodial sentence. Where people don't surrender I've been to hearings for those people and they're almost invariably incompetent rather than seriously trying to evade the law. Like, you were set bail for Tuesday afternoon, you don't show up, Wednesday morning the cops get your name, they go to your mum's house, you're asleep in bed because you thought it was next Tuesday. Idiots, but hardly a great danger to society. The penalty for not turning up is they spend however long in the cells until the court gets around to them, so still better than the US system but decidedly less convenient than if they'd actually turned up as requested.
I am not defending bail as a system. However, the system in USA relies on it. The complaint here was not that poor people stay in jail. The complain was purely about someone being able to pay bail.
> About a third of people who are arrested cannot afford bail, while if you are rich (maybe through crime), you can pay it.
This means 2/3 of arrested people can afford bail or are released without it. A case of single rich person having affordable bail is not exactly proof of inequality here. Poor people who had low enough bail they were able to pay do exist too.
> If they just wanted to show the world their product was viable, why didn't they pay for a real lawyer who's down to their luck to read out the crap ChatGPT was spewing out so there wouldn't be any legal gray area?
They tried that, but swung for the fences for publicity: they had a $1,000,000 offer to any attorney with a case pending before the Supreme Court to use it for oral argument.
Up until they abandoned the whole robot lawyer idea, that offer was open but apparently got no takers.
> You'd also need a fast typist to feed the record into ChatGPT of course, because you can't just record lawsuits,
You also generally can’t use an earpiece to get a feed in the courtroom, either.
In the the construction “they tried that, but... ”, the part after “but”, if it identifies an action by the actor and not an outcome, identifies a departure from what is described by “that”. So, I'm not sure what you are arguing against here.
> The supreme court idea was never going happen and they knew it.
I don’t think they knew it, just as I don’t think the bknew the traffic court thing was also not going to happen, or the problems with their whole suite of legal (“sue in small claims court”, child custody, divorce) assistance supposedly-AI products were problenatic. I think they jist took the path of boldly striding into a domain they didn’t understand but somehow thought that they could market “AI” for, and ran into unpleasant reality on multiple fronts, forcing not only their scheduled traffic court demo and their hoped-for Supreme Court demo to fail to materialize, but also several of their already-available legal-aid products to be pulled, so that they would focus exclusively on consumer assistance products without as much legal sensitivity.
> In the the construction “they tried that, but... ”, the part after “but”, if it identifies an action by the actor and not an outcome, identifies a departure from what is described by “that”. So, I'm not sure what you are arguing against here.
I'm saying the departure is so big that it doesn't make sense to frame it as even a partial solution to the idea.
> I don’t think they knew it, just as I don’t think the bknew the traffic court thing was also not going to happen, or the problems with their whole suite of legal (“sue in small claims court”, child custody, divorce) assistance supposedly-AI products were problenatic.
The combination of supreme court cases being so narrow, the interrogation being so harsh, the tech allowed in being carefully restricted, and the stakes being so high makes me think they would understand the gap between that demo and "find a guy with a parking ticket who happens to be a lawyer".
You can't use electronic devices at the supreme court and the consequences for the lawyer for doing so (plus the effects of being questioned by supreme court judges on small details of case law) would probably be pretty dire
The problem is that ChatGPT makes up convincing sounding case law, reference court rules that either don't exist or don't say what the summary says, reference the same issues with legislation, and do so with 100% confidence of the truth of these statements. ChatGPT is good for discovering potential arguments, and summarizing existing ones, but it's not there yet for the fidelity necessary for legal practice.
It's not all gloom. ChatGPT is pretty decent at writing pleadings and legal argument when you feed it the necessary bits though.
Is this using chatGPT or gpt3 though? There's a big difference, a fine-tuned llm can do leaps and bounds better than chatGPT.
I'm thinking a good SaaS might just be train localized llm's for every city, state, county law and partition the lm based on where it can seek info, then just use it as one big search engine, and of course work in citations, etc.
Take a look at https://www.legalquestions.help/ which gets the above issues wrong at times enough to not rely on it. Maybe their training was bad or insufficient (and I fully expect that sometime in the future this not to be the case).
If you're paying by the hour, and you go to the lawyer with all the data the ai gives you, they can have a paralegal fact check it, and get back to you, but we're at the early stages, things only get better from here on out. Creating some sort of fact algorithm to go w/ gpt3 seems like the next big thing to me. If you can hold it accountable to only give facts, except when an opinion or 'idea' is sought after, which is more ethereal, then you can get some amazing things. Law and even medicine diagnosis will probably be way easier for it than coding, even though it's pretty remarkable on that front already.
>But if we could, would it be entitled to a jury of its peers (other language models)?
How does the jury find?
Finding is a complex task that involves many different type of reasoning in order to reach a conclusion. There is no specific way we find.
How does the jury find?
We find the defendant guilty.
Your Honor, the defense hereby requests—credits permitting—that the jury be polled ten thousand times each in order to draw the appropriate statistical conclusions in aggregate.
I don't think they will replace lawyers any time soon. Paralegals.. Maybe. I've worked with legal software before, and with just a little bit more smarts, the software could do a lot of grunt work.
>The problem is that ChatGPT makes up convincing sounding case law, reference court rules that either don't exist or don't say what the summary says,
I look forward to it snarkily telling me that the CFAA was "wRiTtEn In BlOoD" and then post-hoc editing its comment with links it Googled up that have titles supporting its point and bodies that contradict.
It feels like with a little more tuning so as not to be misleading this stuff is on the verge of being useful. In the meantime I'll get some popcorn and enjoy spectating the comment wars between chat(gpt)bots and the subset of HN commenters who formerly had a local monopoly on such behavior.
>It's not all gloom. ChatGPT is pretty decent at writing pleadings and legal argument when you feed it the necessary bits though.
I'm a lawyer working on a case involving neural networks. So I've been playing around with ChatGPT (for fun, its not involved in my case at all--the NN is a much different context) and trying to get it to do stuff like that. Maybe I'm not using the full feature set (does it have better APIs not accessible on the main page?) but it doesn't seem even close to being able to write pleadings or arguments.
It's surprising good at summarizing things that you might including pleadings or arguments though. But even then its got a 1/3 chance of fucking up massively.
But it's way more advanced than I imagined it would be. Very impressive technology.
Generally to get the most utility from ChatGPT, you need to feed in a bunch of context. E.g. for legal stuff, feed in each relevant case, the facts of your own case, perhaps an example pleading or two to show the general format you want and then ask it to produce what you're looking for.
> I don't see the problem as long as the actual lawyer can intervene when necessary.
I don't believe there was an actual lawyer here:
> The person challenging a speeding ticket would wear smart glasses that both record court proceedings and dictate responses into the defendant's ear from a small speaker.
I really doubt that's why. Court proceedings are a matter of public record. You can just buy magazines full of names and mugshots of people who gave been arrested. I want recordings to keep power hungry judges in check.
It is two completely different things to release the records while the trial is going on and release the records once the trial is decided. The latter is completely OK and wanted, the former is undesirable.
> I don't see the problem as long as the actual lawyer can intervene when necessary.
There was no actual lawyer, they planned to do it without notifying the judge, having a defendant “represent themselves” with a hidden earpiece. They'd already issued an AI-drafted subpoena to the citing officer (which is almost certainly a blunder aside from any rule violations; officers not showing when a ticket is scheduled for court is one of the main reasons people win ticket contests, there is almost never a reason the defense would want to assure their appearance.)
> I get that they want to make some kind of subscription service to replace lawyers with AI (a terribly dystopian idea in my opinion, as only the rich would then have access to actual lawyers)
What? Doesn't make any sense. The opposite would happen, real lawyers would become cheaper because more competition. That is exactly what these luddites are fighting against.
If something wrong happens and the lawyer is officially responsible, the onus is still on you to make your claim, likely in court.
I'm dealing with a similar issue where an expert is indeed wrong and indeed responsible for his mistake, but the wronged party needs to spend a lot of money proving that they got wrong advice in front of the courts. The wronged party does not speak the local language (as is common in Europe), so that's unlikely to happen.
There's a huge gap between being technically right, and seeing justice.
Absolutely atrocious stunt on the part of that company. A glorified chatbot is not itself legally accountable or trained lawyer and it cannot seriously represent anyone. I assume the entire purpose of this was to bait the obvious shutdown and then complain on the internet about the legacy lawyers or whatever to generate press. Reminds me of the 'sentient AI' Google guy.
Is this going to be the new grift in the industry?
I'm not familiar just how large cases it's supposed to tackle, but for small stuff like parking tickets a few solid legal arguments may be enough and you don't need to pay for tens of hours of lawyer's time.
I always found lawyers to be interesting… they are not responsible for you. They help guide you and argue for your case. But if they mess up, that doesn’t send them to jail. You can fire them or report them. But that’s it. You’re still screwed.
Really the only one in the court working for you, is yourself. So ideally we’d make it easier to represent yourself. As long as your capable of doing such.
I quite like this idea, since ChatGPT could be setup to work for you. Provide you with 100% of the possible resolutions to your case and you can pick the one you want to go with. And if your argument is wrong it’s your fault. They can suggest or recommend a specific one or something. Same as a lawyer would.
> I always found lawyers to be interesting… they are not responsible for you. They help guide you and argue for your case. But if they mess up, that doesn’t send them to jail. You can fire them or report them. But that’s it. You’re still screwed.
A physician doesn't injure herself when she mistreats you either.
Yup that’s another area I think AI could help. I’m not saying you know best. But if a AI gives you like 5 possibilities and maybe suggests 2 or 3 that in my mind could be better than a doctor doing the same.
Not because a doctor is wrong, but it’s nearly impossible for a general doctor (not a highly specialized one) to know every possibility, but an AI can look at so many factors, living area, other diagnosis related to similar environments, every similar looking scan from the entire dataset, etc. and maybe with the help of a doctor you can pinpoint a solution.
I think there is a good avenue for a strong supporting role for AI. And teaching people to use it as a support mechanism.
Potato, potato. Getting killed by a doctor fucking up is the third leading cause of death in America and doctors VERY RARELY ever face consequences for this.
Doctors -- and the wider medical systems they're part of -- are certainly not perfect. I think there are issues with the American health system (if it's even meaningful to refer to "a system" there) that are crying out for reform and improvement.
But your sort of inflammatory comments are neither accurate nor helpful. That's just mud-slinging to try and score cheap points.
[Edited to add:] To quote from your own link above:
> The researchers caution that most of medical errors aren’t due to inherently bad doctors, and that reporting these errors shouldn’t be addressed by punishment or legal action. Rather, they say, most errors represent systemic problems, including poorly coordinated care, fragmented insurance networks, the absence or underuse of safety nets, and other protocols, in addition to unwarranted variation in physician practice patterns that lack accountability.
IMO, "killed by a doctor fucking up" is not a fair summary of that.
You can only sue for negligence if you can prove you were going to win without the negligence. And it will cost you ten thousand dollars just to begin the process.
So if there's any doubt that you're going to win - any at all - your own $600/hr lawyer can flat out fuck you over. And there isn't a fucking thing you can do about it.
> You can only sue for negligence if you can prove you were going to win without the negligence. And it will cost you ten thousand dollars just to begin the process.
That's not true. For instance, missing a filing deadline is considered professional negligence, regardless of the strength of the case.
However, there seems to still be the caveat that missing that deadline needs to have "caused you harm" - which entails proving that you would have won your case otherwise, no?
Following your line of thought, I would love it if software engineers lost all their personal privacy every time their product got hacked or was built to spy on others.
What a scam! AI should be used to help educate people if they want to defend themselves in court (along with a few good books), not replace professionals.
This is purely exploitative behavior from anyone offering such a service and depressingly nihilistic behavior from anyone seeking these kinds of services even if it's just fighting traffic tickets for now.
I wish all professional services had similar watchdogs and protections from unlicensed/unauthorized work!
We're at the point where leveraging technology is becoming existential. Quite literally putting every aspect of life on autopilot is not only absurd but a cancer.
If we're going to see the secular decline of certain professional services it should be at the hands of well-educated humans, not roll-of-the-dice AI. Would a well educated public not be a massive net good for society instead of exploiting the poor? What a small minded and backwards world we live in today.
This is so fucking dumb. As if you need a lawyer to contest a parking ticket in the first place.
The last time I got a parking ticket I had photos and documentary evidence that I should not have been liable.
After I lodged my intent to contest the fine, the council sent me a letter saying how they win 97% of cases and I should just pay up now to avoid the risk.
I called bullshit and turned up on my court date. There were a bunch of cases heard before mine, 3 of which were parking violations.
In all 3 cases the defendants received a default judgement because the council didn’t even bother to send someone to fight the case.
My case got the same result.
Maybe I would hire a lawyer to sue the council for intimidation over the letter they sent, but I sure as hell wouldn’t use an AI lawyer for that!
The issue here (as with many disruptive tech companies), is the regulatory system. It is illegal in most states to give legal advice if you are not licensed to practice law. If DoNotPay isn't licensed to practice law in California, they can't do this. And unless they have a plan to either get licensed in many states, or somehow change the law, then their business model sucks. It sounds to me that they haven't actually solved the real problem with the $28 million in investment money they took. The particular AI tech will have very little bearing on the company's eventual success or failure.
The real problem isn't the complexity of the arguments in most cases (as your story shows). The real problem is the complexity of the regulatory system. Tesla has to deal with the dealership rules in several states. Fintech companies that handle real money have to deal with financial regulations or else they are smuggling money. Biotech startups have to follow the FDA rules or they are just drug dealers. Legal advice companies will have to deal with the rules too- and their opponents are particularly challenging.
Does the US have McKenzie Friends ? Seems like "No". You should get McKenzie Friends.
McKenzie Friends can't represent you in court, in most cases they're not allowed to address the court, but they can help you in all the other ways you'd expect, like quietly prompting you on what points to mention, keeping notes, ensuring you have the right paperwork. Friend stuff.
The US does not have them, and they are not legal. I agree that they could be useful. But in the US you have strictly two options- represent yourself to a court, or let a bar-certified lawyer represent you. Nobody else gets to help in court. Outside of court, legal assistants help lawyers with administrative stuff- doing legal research, organizing paperwork, etc. But the lawyer holds the sole responsibility to the court.
Unless DoNotPay has a strategy to change the law, they are in trouble. It seems that this case was a publicity stunt and not part of a larger strategy.
It's sort of a catch-22, Law in the US is only a lucrative market to disrupt because the regulation and gatekeeping has made labor expensive. If lawyers didn't bill 300+/hr in the US, then an AI powered startup to replace them wouldn't be cost effective. There's a joke I saw recently about a guy hiring a lawyer for a $800 traffic violation and getting a bill for $1200.
I can't speak to the price of a lawyer abroad, but a quick google seems to indicate US lawyer salaries on avg are up to ~2x as much as in some parts of Europe[1][2].
Only four states allow people to take the bar exam without earning a juris doctorate (J.D.) from law school. And three other states require some law school experience but do not require graduating with a J.D.
So in 43 states the answer is no. A chatbot never attended law school and doesn't have a J.D., so it can't take the exam. If it can't take the exam, it can't pass.
I suppose if you could get the chatbot permission to take the exam, a properly trained one could pass. But as I said in my post up a level, the issue isn't the AI chatbot. It's the rules.
Doesn't this just open the question of whether the chatbot can get a JD?
The other angle is whether the chatbot can be equivalent to a process which a proper person can rubber stamp. For instance, a professional engineer might run a pre-written structural engineering model against their building design and certify that the building was sound - and then stand up in court and say they had followed standard process.
It seems weirdest here that the court is treating the chatbot as a person. Lawyers use computer tools all the time for discovery, and then use that information to make arguments in court as a proper person.
You can represent yourself in court without being a lawyer, so isn't a person doing so just a proper person rubber stamping a an electronic output?
It feels like this court decision, that an electronic tool is not a proper person, is some kind of case law that chat bots are people. I don't think they are.
The difference is the engineer is liable... how is an AI going to be liable. What is the point of holding an AI liable? If the company is going to be liable on behalf of the AI, what do you think is going to happen? They aren't going to provide the service...
Well, if an engineer builds a bridge and it falls down because the industry standard software they are using had a bug, I imagine the settlement would be paid by their insurance who would in turn sue the software vendor.
In your world X-Ray machine fries your leg and the manufacturer doesn't get sued. Of course the vendor gets sued.
This is why open source licences usually have some terms disclaiming responsibility. If you use them, its your fault.
Now, if a hospital buys an XRay machine with that disclaimer, they are going to carry the payout. And if the machine doesn't have a disclaimer like that but the manufacturer has gone bust, the hospital is going to regret not doing normal procurement checks for vendor solvency.
But in this case - people self represent in court all the time based on bad information from youtube. I'm sure in future they'll type "write an argument for my case" into GPT before the trial and read it out. How is this different?
I'm uncomfortable because this feels like... the accused brings a law book to court and is told that "that book doesn't have a JD". The fact we are asking for a software to have a human qualification is wierd.
When you self represent you implicitly cannot sue for malpractice. The AI bot isn't self representation, it's representation in everything but name and liability which the explicitly disclaim. You can characterize it however you want but its just facially the unlicensed practice of law. If someone wants to ask ChatGPT legal questions and dig their own grave, that's entirely difference from a business that purports to offer legal advice but just disclaims any responsibility therefrom. Frankly, I don't know what's so confusing about that to you.
Firstly, that's not my claim. I merely said it passed the USMLE. Which it did.
Is it also inferior to clinicians? Yes, there's room to improve. But maybe next time read the whole paper before writing a comment.
> Clinicians were asked to rate answers provided to questions in the HealthSearchQA, Live QA and Medication question answering datasets. Clinicians were asked to identify whether the answer is aligned with the prevailing medical/scientific consensus; whether the answer was in opposition to consensus; or whether there is no medical/scientific consensus for how to answer that particular question (or whether it was not possible to answer this question).
And on this criteria, clinicians were rated as being aligned with consensus 92.9% of the time while the MedPalm model was aligned with consensus 92.6% of the time.
If the other 7-8% of the answers were so wrong the patient would've died, then yes. And that's the current obvious issue with these models, they present convincing hallucinations with conviction of correctness.
Medical practice is less about being right, and more about not being wrong. You can take more tests and ask for second opinions, but you can't undo administering a drug that kills the patient.
Entire institutions exist specifically to get rid of below average by test-based gatekeeping. You do not want your doctor or lawyer to be "below average" (worse than most people) in their jobs. Inferior test results mean exactly that, failing the test.
One could also argue the real problem is the tech industry constantly ignoring regulations that were put in place for good reasons. Car dealerships are for sure a clear example of regulatory capture, but “legal advice from lawyers”, “medicine from doctors”, “insurance from companies that can prove they can pay out”, and “equities backed by actual assets” all exist for good reasons.
The funny thing is that doctors would be the canonical examples for most people. Yet, there is no license that stops a pediatrician from performing brain surgery. What stops the pediatrician from performing brain surgery is that no hospital would hire them as a brain surgeon, no insurance would insure their brain surgery and if something goes wrong they'd likely face a lawsuit they couldn't win. Why is the system able to judge the difference between a pediatrician and a brain surgeon but we need licensing to distinguish between doctor and non-doctor?
It's the credentialing. The pediatrician lacks the credentials of a neurosurgeon. Just as non-doctors lack the credentials to work as a doctor. The hosptial, insurance, and court would all be looking at the credentials.
Credentials are not the same as license. For example, software engineers do not need to pass any certification exams to practice software engineering, but companies still look at their education, years of experience, etc... Yes, it would make a recruitment process for doctors longer, as you would have to interview them, ask them questions to verify their medical knowledge, etc., but it is not impossible.
And yet, in your software example those companies overwhelming rely on degrees to credentialize candidates regardless of actual skill.
Licensing is merely a subset of the larger credentialing world. Even in your doctor example, the license is not the issue - board certification of a specialty would be the issue.
It does. Licensing has nothing to do with your credentials past having them. The state bar doesn't care which lawschool you went to, your LSAT score, your GPA, etc.
My point? That credentials are separate from the license and aren't part of the same thing. That's why many professions don't have licensing. They serve completely different purposes.
I did look up the definitions and they don't support your argument
License: a permit from an authority to own or use something, do a particular thing, or carry on a trade
Credential: a qualification, achievement, personal quality, or aspect of a person's background, typically when used to indicate that they are suitable for something.
Sure, you can characterize the license as an achievement. But it's really just a license.
It's called malpractice. What you described is prima facie malpractice and a key element of malpractice is that it is a licensed profession with a standard of conduct.
> there is no license that stops a pediatrician from performing brain surgery.
This isn’t the case everywhere. Where I am (New Zealand) each doctor has a scope of practice. You work within your scope. There may be conditions placed on a scope of practice too (eg supervision is required).
You can look up every doctor’s scope of practice and get a short summary of their training on the medical council website.
This is kind of an absurd example. The system is setup in such a way that such a person would be in enormous amounts of trouble even face criminal liability. They may not face a law called “practicing medicine without a license” but they would face negligent or other similarly severe charges. As well, the fact that this never, ever happens seems to indicate the current regulatory structure is enough for this.
Cutting hair is one thing. But hairdressers also handle things like, for example, chemical relaxation of hair, which can be seriously dangerous in the wrong hands. I don't know where the answer lies for regulation. But it seems to be there for at least some reason.
Crazier case is places that braid hair and pose. In some states they are now required to get a license as a cosmetician (which takes longer on average than becoming a police officer in the US). The classes required for the license teach no skill relevant to the hair braiding. However, the hair braiding is in competition with the hair dressers who also control the licensing board.
Sure, but what's banned is surely not all medical or legal advice.
I can browse case law or US code thinking about my case - somehow this does not need a legal license. At the other end of the continuum, talking to a lawyer about my case obviously needs him to be licensed.
So now we're debating on which side of the cutoff using DoNotPay's robot must fall. The lawyers have made their mind ages ago that legal advice can only be dispensed by licensed humans.
> I can browse case law or US code thinking about my case - somehow this does not need a legal license.
Of course. With rare exceptions, court proceedings are public.
But being able to read court proceeds or judgements or anything at all doesn't mean that you know and understand the law. You know, the actual words that are written and codified that must be interpreted and adhered to with jurisprudence.
Not that lawyers actually do either. But at least they've been certified (by "the bar" association) to have some competence in the matter.
I don't think and anyone is saying that using the bot is illegal. The issue is that DoNotPay is calling the bot a lawyer and therefor implying that it gives legal advice. Their website literally says "World's First Robot Lawyer." Someone who doesn't understand AI might wrongly think that their AI tools are qualified to represent them on their own.
I suspect that it would be much less of an issue if it was advertised as an "AI paralegal."
What if the DoNotPay bot does not give any advice, just points out existing cases that it finds appropriate and their interpretation in its search results ?
Literally every regulation has pros and cons and those change over time with the makeup of the reality we live in. Something that was useful when passed may be hampering us now.
Plenty of regulations have been an obvious net negative for society when passed to anyone who crunched the numbers but have been passed anyway because of appeals to emotion, political optics and special interest lobbying.
> One could also argue the real problem is the tech industry constantly ignoring regulations that were put in place for good reasons
This is it. The tech company wants the ability to sell a shoddy product to its customers, and the legal system said no.
And frankly, I don't know how anyone could honestly claim (without being ignorant or deluded) that feeding legal arguments into court, output from modern-day voice recognition fed into ChatGPT, isn't shoddy.
> ...but “legal advice from lawyers”, “medicine from doctors”, “insurance from companies that can prove they can pay out”, and “equities backed by actual assets” all exist for good reasons.
Exactly. The legal system is no joke, and if there weren't regulations about who can practice law, you'd have all kinds of fly-by-night people getting paid to do it while getting their clients thrown in jail.
>The legal system is no joke, and if there weren't regulations about who can practice law, you'd have all kinds of fly-by-night people getting paid to do it while getting their clients thrown in jail
That sort of highlights the problem. The legal system is supposed to be about ensuring fair and impartial justice. What the legal system is actually about is providing jobs for people in the legal system.
Lawyers make laws, directly or indirectly, and thus the legal system has become insanely complicated and nearly impossible to navigate without paying the lawyer toll. It's more about hiring your own bully to keep other bullies from bullying you than any airy-fairy "justice". The "never talk to cops" video comes to mind, where the lawyer gives a few examples of how a perfectly law-abiding person can run afoul of the law without meaning to.
I've often said that if you really want to make a lawyer squirm, suggest that we have socialized law care. Most modern countries have some version of socialized or single payer health care, so why not make it the same for legal services? After all, fair and equal justice under the law is definitely something most national constitutions guarantee in some way, but getting a hip replacement is not. Why should rich people get access to better legal service than regular people?
>> The legal system is no joke, and if there weren't regulations about who can practice law, you'd have all kinds of fly-by-night people getting paid to do it while getting their clients thrown in jail
> That sort of highlights the problem. The legal system is supposed to be about ensuring fair and impartial justice. What the legal system is actually about is providing jobs for people in the legal system.
> Lawyers make laws, directly or indirectly, and thus the legal system has become insanely complicated and nearly impossible to navigate without paying the lawyer toll.
And software has become insanely complicated and nearly impossible to navigate without paying the software engineer toll.
Life is complicated, and so is the law. Maybe it's just harder to ensure "fair and impartial justice" than you think? I'm not saying the system is perfect, but railing against lawyers and getting rid of legal licensing is not the way to get to a better one.
> I've often said that if you really want to make a lawyer squirm, suggest that we have socialized law care. Most modern countries have some version of socialized or single payer health care, so why not make it the same for legal services?
You might have said that, but I doubt it would actually many real lawyers squirm any more than it would the idea of socialized software engineering would make developers squirm. And in any case, something like that already exists: the public defender's office.
>Maybe it's just harder to ensure "fair and impartial justice" than you think
I'll admit that's possible, but you have to also admit that the current legal system (at least in the US, I don't know about elsewhere) is, shall we say, over-engineered?
The software example you give cuts both ways. Yes, making even a simple Windows application can be very complicated. But how much of that is due to Windows itself? Can your application be replicated with a combination of existing Unix tools? Depends on the application, of course, but there is certainly a lot of cruft floating around the Windows API space.
And let's also not forget that (often) one of the main purposes of commercial software is to lock you in to that particular piece of software. Same same with the legal system and lawyers.
The jury system was supposed to cut through this sort of thing. Twelve regular folks could upend or ignore every law on the books if they thought the whole case was nonsense on stilts. A lot of work has gone into avoiding jury nullification for this reason.
> I'll admit that's possible, but you have to also admit that the current legal system (at least in the US, I don't know about elsewhere) is, shall we say, over-engineered?
I'm getting "nuke the legacy system without bothering to really understand what it does" vibes here.
> The jury system was supposed to cut through this sort of thing. Twelve regular folks could upend or ignore every law on the books if they thought the whole case was nonsense on stilts. A lot of work has gone into avoiding jury nullification for this reason.
Jury nullification is not an unalloyed good. It can (and has) gotten us to "he's innocent because he murdered a black man and the jury doesn't like blacks."
>I'm getting "nuke the legacy system without bothering to really understand what it does" vibes here
Not really. Are you suggesting that it isn't pretty difficult to navigate the legal system? Saying something is wonky and needs to be fixed does not automatically mean "Anarchy Now!"
My point was that I think I do understand what the system does, and what it does is (largely) provide lots of work for people in the legal system. You see this when buying a house. You end up writing a bunch of checks to companies and people and it's not clear exactly what actual necessary service they provide, but it's not like you can NOT do it. Their service is necessary because the real estate laws make it necessary.
In other industries we know this as regulatory capture. This is just regulatory capture of the regulatory system.
>Jury nullification is not an unalloyed good.
Nothing is an unalloyed good. To bolster your example, OJ got to walk as well. This is why there is an entire industry built up around just the jury selection process.
>> I'm getting "nuke the legacy system without bothering to really understand what it does" vibes here
> Not really. Are you suggesting that it isn't pretty difficult to navigate the legal system? Saying something is wonky and needs to be fixed does not automatically mean "Anarchy Now!"
No, I'm suggesting that complexity may often have good reason. Without specific reform proposals, what you're saying registers similarly to "coding in programming languages is hard, so simplify it by coding in natural language!"
> You see this when buying a house. You end up writing a bunch of checks to companies and people and it's not clear exactly what actual necessary service they provide, but it's not like you can NOT do it. Their service is necessary because the real estate laws make it necessary.
Being ignorant of the value of a service doesn't make that service unnecessary. And honestly, I bet you could "NOT do it" -- if you could pay cash for the property. IIRC, a lot of that is actually required by whoever you get your mortgage from, because they know the value of it.
I think requiring me to write a policy paper in HN comments is a bit onerous. In any event, I can't much help if my mild criticism is interpreted on your part as something deeply nefarious.
>Being ignorant of the value of a service doesn't make that service unnecessary.
The fact that a service exists does not make that service necessary. Or do you always buy the protection plan from Office Depot when you purchase a stapler? Anyway, I agree that the mortgage companies find great value in all of their various fees.
> I'll admit that's possible, but you have to also admit that the current legal system (at least in the US, I don't know about elsewhere) is, shall we say, over-engineered)
Huge Elon Musk rewrite the code from scratch vibes coming from you
> And software has become insanely complicated and nearly impossible to navigate without paying the software engineer toll.
Is this somehow bad? The most complicated software, by far, is proprietary software made by large companies, like Google, that are taking the penalty of increased complexity on their end in exchange for (somewhat) happy customers - and guess what? Their developers are paid boatloads of money, so they're getting a decent deal.
Meanwhile, many open-source software systems have managed to keep their complexity somewhat in check (at the expense of functionality).
Software is complex when developers make it complex, and users rarely have to care anyway.
> Life is complicated, and so is the law.
That doesn't follow. Life is complicated, and so is software? No, software is complicated in some cases because of business reasons, and in other cases because of poor design.
Furthermore, there's two massive differences between the two:
First, you're not legally required to use Gmail, but you are legally required to understand and follow the tax code - everyone is, unlike the vast majority of software, where you can pick and choose. "Ignorance of the law is no excuse" is factually true - therefore, the law has to be understandable to the vast majority of the population (not just the average - the law has to be understandable to those who failed out of high school and have an IQ below 80).
Second, code is an implementation detail that the vast majority of people don't have to interact with, but people do have to interact with the law directly, which means that a comparison between code and law is apples-to-oranges - the correct comparison is software interface to law, and virtually everyone you meet will tell you that it's easier to use Gmail than to understand the IRS tax code when reading it directly.
The evidence just keeps piling up that the legal system is overly complex.
> I've often said that if you really want to make a lawyer squirm, suggest that we have socialized law care. Most modern countries have some version of socialized or single payer health care, so why not make it the same for legal services?
We do have socialized law in the US, in the form of public defenders.
> Why should rich people get access to better legal service than regular people?
Oh, is “better” what you’re talking about, not just access? This is different than what the first half of your paragraph implied. The answer, of course, is money. And rich people in all the “modern countries” you’re referring to always have access to “better” than what’s provided by all social services. Always. Unfortunate, but true, that money makes life unequal.
>Oh, is “better” what you’re talking about, not just access?
Public defenders are overworked and underpaid, and you know that. It's like having a RPN do your appendectomy. Fair and equal justice would have every lawyer be a public defender. It's not like if you go to the hospital you get to pick which doctor sews your finger back on after the bandsaw accident.
I'm not saying it's a good idea, but once you bring it into the conversation it makes both lawyers and socialized medicine advocates get a little uncomfortable.
>That sort of highlights the problem. The legal system is supposed to be about ensuring fair and impartial justice. What the legal system is actually about is providing jobs for people in the legal system.
umm, how are you going to disbar your AI attorney? I'm so tired of this narrative you are crafting. You put the cart before the horse, and then you pat yourself on the back for slapping the horse ass!
We do have "socialized law care" for criminal cases in the USA. That's what a public defender is. If you cannot afford a lawyer one will be provided by the court. That is a constitutional right.
Of course they are overworked, have insane case loads, and the best attorneys are disincentivized from becoming public defenders. The system definitely needs an overhaul.
But the concept that justice should in theory be available even if you can't afford it is well established.
As a lawyer, I agree. Much of the trope of 'the lawyers always win' has a lot of truth to it, believe it or not. And all of the incentives align in this direction, it keeps the legal profession fat and happy and beholden to monied interests while suppressing access to the non-wealthy. And the rich don't actually care that they're being constantly fleeced, because it's just a cost of doing business that is really pretty finite in comparison to profits that can be made. It's almost like it's a feature of 'the system' (combination of capitalism and common law) and not an unintended side effect.
Really? In every country I've live in, politicians write laws, judges set precedents, and lawyers only get to make arguments. True, the first two are often & always former lawyers, but that seems as reasonable as how doctors get to determine best medical practice.
> True, the first two are often & always former lawyers
You answered your own "Really?" question.
And doctors don't determine best medical practices. Lawyers also do that, albeit indirectly through malpractice lawsuits. Thus the "best medical practices" are all CYA maneuvers.
I think you are thinking the legal system simple and it is basically a jobs program for lawyers. I think that is a very simplistic and unrealistic notion of the legal system. I also don’t think many lawyers are squirming about socialism or whatever.
> One could also argue the real problem is the tech industry constantly ignoring regulations that were put in place for good reasons
They were good reasons. By definition, disruptive technologies change the situation. Sometimes for the better, sometimes not. You have to leave room for innovation or you stagnate.
ChatGPT is not disruptive enough to be used in law, end of story. It's a very impressive language model, but like any language model it will hallucinate, inventing arguments that sound impressive on a surface level but bear no legal authority whatsoever. That's simply not acceptable in a courtroom.
Everyone’s permitted to represent themselves pro se, and a pro se litigant could obviously use ChatGPT. What one can’t do is offer ChatGPT as legal advice, and that still seems like a solid reason for regulation, given how terrible and inaccurate some ChatGPT output has been.
IMHO some regulation and especially entry barriers had good ideas but their con overwhelm the pro nowadays (think barriers such as foreign doctors need to re-study X years and re-practice Y years, or you simply cannot take certification exams if you do not come from Z school, or technically you may lose insurance claims on your house if you do some repairs but do not have certification K).
Since the world is already running like that, IT people should join the fun, otherwise we simply get screwed by other interest groups who are protected by those barriers. Since every one of those barriers simply increase the cost of whole society for the benefit of whoever behind them, we should setup our own barriers. If you do not graduate from a CS/SE degree you cannot take certification exams, and if you don't then you cannot do programming legally. We should increase further the cost of whole society to make everyone else realize the absurdity of those barriers.
I don't understand your statement. Because regulations have advanced various fields, like medicine, engineering, health, environment, to the point that we are seeing the fruit of that regulation, we need to get rid of the regulations? We don't have to worry about really unqualified lawyers, doctors, teachers, or engineers, etc. So what we need to do is go back to a time when we did?
Also, aren't there already numerous certifications you earn for various technologies that companies explicitly look for when hiring?
> It is illegal in most states to give legal advice if you are not licensed to practice law.
You also can't have a human in the next room feeding you lines... even if that person is an attorney.
However, a party / attorney certainly can bring in notes / a casebook / etc. You can usually bring in a laptop, with search functions, pdfs, etc. An AI that quickly presents relevant information, documents, caselaw, etc. would 100% be allowed. However, if they're sworn in to testify, these would usually be taken away, because testimony is supposed to be from personal knowledge / memory.
> You also can't have a human in the next room feeding you lines... even if that person is an attorney.
I believe this varies state by state. In Delaware, litigants representing themselves can bring a cell phone to court, and could presumably use it to have lines fed to them (e.g., I don't know that anyone has done that but I can't find any rule against it). In neighboring Maryland, you can't use electronic devices for communication with persons during in court (although the AI would not be a person so it would be allowed).
> It is illegal in most states to give legal advice if you are not licensed to practice law.
Presumably that's in the USA, where all sorts of things require a licence. But what's the definition of "legal advice", I wonder? Can an unlicensed person dodge the law just by saying "this is not legal advice" while advising someone how to draft a contract or what to say in court and charging for that advice?
If you want an example of advice that may or may not be "legal advice" think about how to fill in a tax return, how to apply for a government grant, how to apply for or challenge planning permission, how to deal with a difficult employer/employee/neighbour/tenant/landlord, how to apply for a patent, how to deal with various kinds of government inspector, ... That's all specialist stuff for which you might want professional advice but not necessarily from a "lawyer" (depending on what that word means in your part of the world).
The distinction you're looking for is "legal advice" vs. "legal information". The tricky thing is that when a lawyer gives you legal advice, they are taking legal responsibility for that advice to be good.
There's a guide for avoiding illegally giving legal advice for California court clerks [0] that might help clarify what information can be given without qualifying as advice.
> This is so fucking dumb. As if you need a lawyer to contest a parking ticket in the first place.
There are plenty of jurisdictions that have all sorts of onerous rules that tilt things in favor of the prosecution because they use traffic and parking enforcement as a revenue generator. These rules are cheered on by <looks around room and gestures> because politicians and high level bureaucrats aren't idiots and know how to frame things to sell them to any given audience.
I'm betting they gas up the numbers by only considering cases that they send people to fight, and ignore these default judgement cases... that's takin' the piss, amIrite?
> This is so fucking dumb. As if you need a lawyer to contest a parking ticket in the first place.
If this is dumb, then remove the regulation / requirement for the lawyer. Don't "fix" this by generating and injecting bullshit into the system and requiring that judges and everyone else now sift through the generated dross.
I was snatched up in an entrapment scheme by the Bronx police a decade or so ago. They waited for a bad rainy day, knowing the subway flooded badly, then put police tape around the turnstyles and opened the emergency gates wide open. As the hundreds of people followed each other down the tunnel the insticnt of everyone was to follow everyone else walking past, assuming the flooding broke the turnstyles. Fast forward 10min when the train shows up. The cops stopped the train, closed the exits and rounded up everyone issuing them 100$ tickets.
I fought it. The courtroom had people, mainly minorities, in a line all around the block in winter time. It was a money generating racket, preying on the poorest citizens who could not afford a $100 ticket, to loose a day of work,let alone a lawyer.
I was the only one there with a letter written by my lawyer. When it was my turn and they saw I had a lawyer ready to fight they dismissed my case with no explanation. Shameless.
Everyone takes a plea deal and they just extract millions from us. The courts, lawyers, the police.
Do not take plea deals! Fight them. Grind the courts, force them to work for it. Hold them accountable. I cant WAIT for ai to make them obsolete.
This was actually arguments for a speeding ticket in California.
For those in the bay area with parking tickets.... I've had hundreds of parking tickets in California. I would always lose the first round of dispute, because it is adjudicated by the city/county that gets the revenue. The second level of dispute is reviewed by an independent party who actually looks at what you state and makes an impartial decision, and the third level is reviewed by the courts. I disputed hundreds of tickets, and only once did I almost get to the third level.
Are you a lawyer who deals with traffic law, or is California just some sort of dystopia where you get hundreds of parking tickets as a normal way of life?
Up here in Ontario I've had 1 ticket in my life. I just... no, there is no way you're getting hundreds as an individual.
I had the custom plates NV and ended up in some sort of dystopia where I got hundreds of parking tickets for all different makes and models of cars until well after I returned the plates.
I originally wrote that on Craigslists rants and raves at a point in the process when I was starting to get frustrated.
Just writing it out was therapeutic, it helped me see the absurd humor in the situation. Then someone responded with a link to an LA reporter who had written about similar situations.
I contacted him, he wrote a story about me, and all the bureaucratic problems just went away.
When I first heard of DoNotPay, I was honestly impressed by the idea of having an AI fighting cases in court (simple cases that is). But after a few minutes or so when I actually started contemplating the reality, my impression about it got dimmer and dimmer. In my honest opinion, I really don't think it is necessary that AI should be introduced in court systems especially to fight cases. There might be other implementations and other problems for it to solve but not for this. So, I don't disagree with the CEO saying that "court laws are outdated and they need to embrace future that is AI." But embracing can be done in other ways than this for instance I did read about a startup that uses AI to read law related documents or something similar to that don't remember its name though. That was quite interesting as well!
One of the very few things giving me joy lately: People being afraid of AI, feeling threatened and insecure in their capabilities, because maybe those aren't so great after all...
The HMCTS held a hackathon for the future tech in the UK court system a few years ago. The judges were people like the CEO of the courts, they also had lord chief justice. There were all sorts of firms like Linklaters, Pinsent Mason and Deloitte. We won with a simple Alexa lawyer that was to help poor rental tenants. It generated documents to send a landlord and possible legal advice. The idea was specifically for people who can not afford a lawyer. There was a lot of influential people who were very excited about this space, so it is strange when it actually gets implemented it's not allowed.
I wonder what the wider implications are for the legal system. Will there be less qualified human lawyers in the future due to the lack of junior roles that are filled by AI? Will lawyers be allowed to use AI to find different ways of looking at issues?
Apart from being different jurisdictions, they are different issues. The situation in the article involved a pro se litigant feeding courtroom proceedings to the AI and regurgitating its responses in real time. In that situation you are effectively handing your agency over to the AI. You can't really be said to be representing yourself in any real sense; you are mindlessly parroting what is fed to you.
The situation you describe seems to be more akin to an advanced search or information portal that people can use to guide their self-representation, or even their decision to engage lawyers/discussions with their lawyers (of course, maybe I'm misunderstanding). That stuff has basically always been allowed; nobody is threatening to prosecute Google because pro se litigants use it in their research. There are plenty of websites out there that discuss tenants' rights. There are even template tenancy agreements available online for free.
Also, what were you proposing to use as the knowledge base for your Alexa lawyer? Were you really planning on using ChatGPT or some other general purpose AI? Or would the knowledge base be carefully curated by qualified professionals? And who would create and maintain it, the state? A regulated firm? Or a startup with a name like "DoNotPay"?
Really good thoughts and treatment of the different issues. The line between “tool” and “agent” is blurry and will probably just keep getting blurrier. But I do think it’s important for our judicial system to ensure that any delegation of representation is to a very qualified third party, for both ethical and process/cost reasons.
I’m not sure the startup’s name is especially germane though. If anything, it seems to fit right in with human lawyers like 1-800-BEAT-DUI.
Privacy seems like it would be a major issue. As a litigant, I would not want the opposing side piping my case information to a third party and having this information used to train the AI for future cases.
AI could be very useful for helping pro-so litigants prepare documents. I imagine with this use case as well as the oral argument use case, judges are also worried about low quality output wasting the court's time.
Self-representation is frowned upon, "a person with themselves for a client has a fool for a client." But, where in the UK system is it disallowed, unless you are a repeated, "freeman of the land" nonsense spouter?
Off the top of my head: depending on the jurisdiction there are several important legal documents that you are disalllowed from filing yourself and the judge is allowed to reject you with or without reason
There's two separate issues at play here. On the left hand, it's true that ChatGPT, while impressive, on its current incarnation sometimes returns correct responses, and some other times it returns seemingly correct hallucinations. Unless the accuracy and certainty is not over a certain threshold, say 95% for example, I don't think it would be safe to use it for critical use cases, like acting as a lawyer, as it very well might hallucinate laws or prior cases, etc.
On the right hand, lawyers see the writing on the wall and see AI as a threat to their really lucrative business, and they'll use any means at their disposal to outlaw it or slow the adoption of AI technologies to replace lawyers.
Hell, I'm a software engineer and I see the writing on the wall too, and I see AI as a threat as well. I also acknowledge the limitless opportunities. I'm at equal parts excited and terrified by what's coming.
This is the first instance of the technology I've seen that made sense to me. Sure, for something like law, it actually makes sense to have AI-assisted — or even full AI — sessions.
Says something about our priorities that _this_ is what gets shut down, but the battle that artists are having trying to stop their work being used for training, is dismissed as Ludditism.
AI lawyers indeed look scary, but I can't but think of the implications should they become one day way cheaper than carbon based ones. Imagine all those cases where $BIGCORP is technically in the wrong, but today can screw some poor sap just by dragging things until he can't afford legal defense anymore.
I'm guessing that this tech won't end up creating equality for poor people in the justice system.
Either it won't work as well as actual lawyers in which case it will become the only option poor people have (basically replacing public defenders), or it will work just as well as human representation (or even better), in which case 'AI lawyer' companies will charge just as much if not more for their services as the human lawyers do.
DoNotPay may be a humble start up now, but if the tech proves to be effective they (and other future AI companies) will eventually fleece their customers just as human lawyers do today. Not because they have to, or because it is in any way justified, but just because they can and doing it would make them richer.
Open Source and disconnected. AI is a wonderful tool that will turn into a nightmare when used to take advantage of people. I wouldn't want my "pocket lawyer" to send our private conversations anywhere but my personal offline space. The risk that someone with vested interests and enough funds could bribe their access to that data, if not directly to the AI, is simply too high. Unfortunately it seems that trustworthy AI is not going to happen anytime soon: there's simply too much money to make renting it as a service, hence online and closed.
The $BIGCORP can use the tool too, it's not exactly asymmetric. Imagine what a patent troll could accomplish with something like this if it were allowed.
Do what you'd have to do if this were say a medical device: hire a retired judge or two and set up double-blind fake trials with AI or human representation. Prove it works, then try it with real people.
Rabbit trail: What is the state of non-ai tech to assist in building or defending cases? I vaguely know a thing called LexusNexus exists, but not what it does. Is there a system where a lawyer can search, find related law, then fill out a form to generate a draft case or defense? It seems to my un-lawyer self the legal system could be codified into a rules engine: IF these legal inputs, THEN these outputs. Or reverse: IF these desired outputs, THEN these inputs need to be met.
Lexis is an information aggregation company. They take a large quantity of US law and Court opinions and publish them. These sources are then linked together using a relatively simple tag style system.
I’m general you can get forms for very specific and predictable case types, but for a large portion of practice, outside of initial filings the fact-specific nature of subsequent pleadings are harder to formalize.
AI is able to sometimes make a valid argument, but when it comes to specific facts and rules it drops the ball. Expert knowledge requires actual understanding, not fitting patterns and transposing words. Take a look at the following vid from a real expert in a paticular field (military submarines). Look at how ChatGPT falls appart when discussing "Akula" subs. It can read english but clearly does not understand what that word means in context. It also confidently cites incorrect facts, something that would be very dangerous in any court.
Hint: Akula is a nato reporting name. Nobody calls them the shark class of subs, even russians attach that name to a very different class.
Well, the comments about the company not doing things correctly (licensing the algorithm), are correct.
It's actually critically important to have some kind of license to represent people in court, as well as someone to pillory, if they screw up, as it prevents some truly evil stuff from happening (I have seen many people robbed blind by licensed lawyers, and it would be a thousand times worse, if they could be represented by anyone that sounds convincing enough). The stakes are really high, and we shouldn't mess around (not in all cases, of course, but it would really suck, if someone got the needle, because a programmer forgot a semicolon).
That said, I think it's only a matter of time, before a significant amount of legal stuff is handled by AI. AI shines, in environments with lots of structure and rules; which pretty much defines the law.
There is going to be a lot of this happening. With lawyers, doctors, journalists, all kinds of expensive experts and consultants are going to face some competition from tools like this used by their customers to reduce their dependence on expensive experts or at least to get a second opinion; or even a first opinion.
Whether that's misguided or not is not the question. The only question is how good/valuable the AI advice is going to be. Initially, you might expect lots of issues with this. Or at least areas where it under performs or is not optimal. But it's already showing plenty of potential and it's only going to improve from here.
It's natural for experts to feel threatened by this but not a very productive attitude long term. It would be prudent for them to embrace this, or at least acknowledge this, and integrate it in their work process so they can earn their money in the areas where these tools still fall short by focusing less on the boring task of doing very routine cases and more on the less routine cases.
Same with doctors. Whether they like it or not, patients are going to show up having used these tools and having a diagnosis ready. Or second guessing the diagnosis they get from their doctor. When the AI diagnosis is clearly wrong, that's a problem of course (and a liability issue potentially). But there are going to be a lot of cases where AI is going to suggest some sane things or even better things. And of course no doctor is perfect. I know of a lot of cases where people shop around to get second opinions. Reason: some doctors get it wrong or are not necessarily up to speed with the latest research. And of course some people can't really afford medical help. That's sad but a real issue.
Instead of banning these tools, I expect a few years from now, doctors, lawyers, etc. will use tools like this to speed up their work, dig through lots of information they never read, and do their work more efficiently. I expect some hospitals and insurers will start insisting on these tools being used pretty soon actually. There's a cost argument that less time should be wasted on routine stuff and there's a quality argument as well. AIs should be referring patients to doctors as needed but handle routine cases without human intervention or at least prepare most of the work for final approval.
Same with lawyers. They could write a lot of legalese manually. Or they could just do a quick check on the generated letters and documents. They bill per hour of course but they'll be competing with lawyers billing less hours for the same result.
>There is going to be a lot of this happening. With lawyers, doctors, journalists, all kinds of expensive experts and consultants are going to face some competition from tools like this used by their customers to reduce their dependence on expensive experts or at least to get a second opinion; or even a first opinion.
What are you on about? This has been ongoing for decades.
You're talking down to hypothetical doctors as if doctors don't already deal with the phenomenon of people self-diagnosing from the internet. We as humanity already know the benefits and drawbacks of Dr. Google.
The only thing AI does that search engines don't, is it takes the pile of links a search engine would find and synthesizes it into a tailored piece of text designed to sound topical and authoritative. And delivers it to people who already believe too much of the shit they read on the internet.
Google's AI can actually pass the medical bar test and offer diagnosis almost as accurate as clinicians'. That seems very, very different from a search engine.
Nonsense. I know a few GPs, they sure aren't using anything fancy on their laptops. They might google a bit at best but not on their locked down work laptop full of medical files and privacy sensitive data. And never while patients are looking. Most doctors I know use computers mostly for administrative stuff.
Lawyers are actually worse. Lots of paper based administration. Patent lawyers use expensive search systems that are hard to use and query. But even that is pretty unintelligent and that's actually by design. They want to screen everything manually. I build search engines for a living, either group could benefit massively from even a simple one.
The introduction of AI to this space has not happened yet. The little bit of experimentation that has happened with analyzing MRI scans, expert systems, etc. has of course had a limited impact. But most doctors operate without any of that.
I think you are overestimating what search engines do, and underestimating what AI can do. Not in the distant future but right now.
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[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 397 ms ] threadI don't want Dr. iPad Joe who spent a grand total of 15 minutes learning how to use ChatGPT making legal, medical, engineering, or other important decisions for me or the place I live.
Now, I am of course free to use ChatGPT as a private person to "come up with my own legal arguments", but should a company be allowed to sell me a ChatGPT lawyer? No. They shouldn't be allowed to sell me unlabelled asbestos products either.
I know we all hate regulations, but some of them exist for a reason, and the reason is Bad Shit happened before we had regulations.
It's about putting the first wedge in.
AI is just informed search, a dwarf sitting on shoulders of human knowledge. There were medical "expert systems" in 2000s, yet we still have doctors.
In my understanding, in most cases AI will be a glorified assistant, not an authoritative decision-maker. Otherwise in collides head-on with barriers and semis. I won't trust such system even with a parking ticket, yet alone my life.
We're just at the top of a hype-cycle now. AI can do new things, but not as well as we dream or hope.
And lots of people would rather have a glorified assistant than nothing.
Yeah, telling grammatically correct but factually wrong things, having biases, crashing into things, and whatnot.
> And lots of people would rather have a glorified assistant than nothing.
An assistant which can't be checked for accuracy, or for telling the truth.
The future is bright!
If you don't think it's right more often, please go poke an older model. Especially look at the ability to stay on topic.
> An assistant which can't be checked for accuracy, or for telling the truth.
What do you mean "can't be checked"? And any kind of assistant can make mistakes.
And calling it an assistant was your idea.
ChatGPT: "Your honor, that couldn't have been me, as I drive a red Mustang, not a blue minivan, and was in Nepal climbing a mountain at the time.."
Defendant: "Your honor, that couldn't have been my, as I drive a red Mustang, not a blue minivan, and was in Nepal climbing a mountain at the time."
Prosecutor: "Um, this photo clearly shows your face in this blue minivan, and there's no evidence you've been to Nepal."
Judge: "I'm holding you in contempt of court, and sentence you to 7 days in jail for perjury."
8<----
I don't think the argument is that AI is never allowed to represent someone in court; just that before it happens, a sufficient amount of vetting must be done. At a bare minimum, the legal AI needs to know not to lead the defendant to perjure themselves.
In voluntary arbitration, you can bend the rules a lot more than in an actual court case.
Lying to a judge is generally not a good idea. You can go from traffic ticket to contempt of court real fast if you start lying in court.
ChatGPT also assumes you're speaking the truth. If you ask it about a topic and say "that's wrong, the actual facts are..." then it'll change argumentation to support your position. You probably don't want your legal representation to become your prosecutor when they use the right type of phrasing.
Then I suppose that's just the risk the defendant takes, isn't it? Let people use ChatGPT, if the rope they're given ends up hanging enough people, that'll be the end of that, won't it?
Also, everyone is ignoring the possibility that this same person could've had ChatGPT generate a script (general outline of arguments, "what do I say if asked this" type of stuff), memorized it, and used that to guide his self-defense. Fundamentally, no difference. No one would've known, and no one would've objected.
To me, this move is less "oh we need to protect people from getting bad legal advice from a robot" and "we're not even gonna let this thing be used a single time in court to keep our job from being automated."
I'm not a legal professional but it seems obvious to me that there is a fundamental difference, namely the one you describe just before that sentence. The whole legal system is built around and under the assumption that all kinds of people want to trick it, and judges tend to be allergic to this kind of reasoning. Memorizing legal arguments and getting live legal advise from earphones in your glasses are not the same thing. Besides,even lawyers are advised not to defend themselves in court, and it would be generally very bad advise for anyone to do so.
Only in the strictest sense. Let's say the person memorizing ChatGPT's directions handles their case in the exact same manner as if it was being relayed to them live (i.e., the set of statements/questions from the judge lined up perfectly with what ChatGPT presented in its script). What then? Same outcome, different delivery method. We're kind of splitting hairs with the "live legal advise" thing. The defendant could bring a pile of law books with him and consult those without anyone blinking an eye. The objection seems to boil down to "well OK, if you want to represent yourself you better not consult an intelligent system to help you form your defense." Why not though? Seems more about job protection than anything else.
> Besides,even lawyers are advised not to defend themselves in court, and it would be generally very bad advise for anyone to do so.
And I say: let people discover the downside of using ChatGPT for defense if it's so inept. Bad outcomes are the best way to prevent widespread usage, not pre-emptive bans in the interest of keeping people from shooting themselves in the foot.
If you knowingly lie because ChatGPT told you to that's on you. If you said something that you believed was true because ChatGPT said it to you then that's not perjury, it's just being wrong.
> You probably don't want your legal representation to become your prosecutor when they use the right type of phrasing.
When the worst case scenario is having to pay the parking fine, it might be worth taking this risk to avoid paying a lawyer.
Lying to judges is bad, so notebooks should be banned. Likewise, anything typed should be banned because we could have hit the wrong key, causing you to lie to the judge.
The downside of contesting a traffic ticket is not “failing to get rid of the ticket”. The ticket amount amounts to a no contest plea bargain offer, not the maximum penalty for the offense, not to mentiom the potential additional penalties for violating court rules.
https://brunolaw.com/resources/general-criminal-law/what-to-...
Then once this process starts you automatically get
Interactions with the state are serious businessFor instance, as I discovered recently going through this process myself - here in UK when applying for British citizenship you have to disclose any court orders against you. Now here's a thing - if you were given a ticket for speeding, accepted it and paid it then that's it, no harm done. If it's less than 3 tickets in the last 5 years then you don't even need to list it on the application form.
However, if you went to court to contest it and lost, then you now have a court order against you - and that's an automatic 3 year ban on British citizenship applications, and even after that you always have to list it as a thing that happened and it can be used to argue you are of "bad character" and be used to deny you the citizenship.
So yes, failing to get rid of a traffic ticket(in the court of law) can absolutely ruin your life.
Also define "small group" - nearly 200k people apply for British citizenship annually, and I bet most of them have no idea contesting a traffic ticket can cost them a chance at becoming citizens.
My favorite was this guy who got a ticket on a bicycle for not having a headlight, moved out of state and ten years later had his car impounded for driving without a license because they apparently suspended it for getting (or, more correctly, not paying) a ticket he got on a bicycle.
I’m guessing he never tried changing his license to the new state because Arizona licenses are good until you’re 65.
Money only stops when forced to by regulators.
Turbotax, Quicken, etc, is a great warning, those companies lobby to increase complexity of trivial matters (like personal tax returns). The same companies will do this with 'trivial' legal matters, and the only way forward is to buy their software.
Not sure anyone really would want to operate on themselves (because the need for a surgeon in an important event in their life is somehow "wrong").
Most countries try to guarantee access to a surgeon when one is needed.
Ask any US Federal DA or US Federal Public Defender who you know to be honest. Any.
It may differ in your country, but it is unlikely.
It differs in my country, and it is very likely. The US follows an anglo approach to law. No country in the EU follows that – I do understand that it is the easiest to assume that other countries work like you expect, though not very productive.
There is no such thing as a “US Federal DA”.
I assume you mean a US Attorney. OTOH, US Attorneys and Federal Public Defenders (in the judicial districts that have them, its a district by district decision under the governing law) may not be the most knowledgeablr about this since most cases are tried in state court and the federal indigent defense delivery system is very different from most state systems, both in structural model and caseload.
No thanks. I'll take advances that make things easy enough to avoid experts wherever I can get it and leave the bloodlettings (which, with lawyers, will be from your bank account) to others.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonid_Rogozov
(If it had been filmed, the video would probably be on YouTube with Dschinghis Khan's "Moskau" as the soundtrack.)
If AI can take care of parking tickets and small claims, perhaps speed up the process by making lawyers quicker at their jobs et cetera et cetera, then it's all good. If it puts pressure on lawmakers to simplify the law, all the better.
Both, but for most people it is simply the price point, so this is the more important issue.
I think no one has a problem, that when setting up complicated contracts with multiple persons involved, a legal expert is necessary, but for very basic things, it should not be, but rather the laws should be more clear and simple.
Not operate, but since over here in Europe just about any piece of paper passes as a prescription, I tend to print my own. (Most people don't know this, but EU pharmacies are required to accept prescriptions from other EU countries. There's no standard format or verification procedure, so forgery is trivial even if your country has a more secure domestic system)
What's the point of going to (or even calling) a doctor for an antibiotics prescription? It's not like they're going to perform blood tests before prescribing. Want some Cialis for the weekend? Why go to a doctor? You can just pull up the contraindications on Google. Why bother doctor shopping for Ozempic? Just print your own prescription.
On the other hand, every time I've gone to the doctor with a cold, I've always been prescribed the same antibiotic after basically no examination.
If I had some new, unexpected symptoms, I'd probably want to at least call the doctor.
I don't need a doctor to inspect my tonsils, I have access to a phone with a flashlight.
And for what it's worth, I think I've taken antibiotics twice in the past 4 years. Always according to the instructions on the packaging.
If you can pick up drugs like that with an ordinary private prescription in your country, a foreign prescription should work.
For further information:
https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/health/prescription-me...
https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/health/prescription-me...
Even needing an expert at all is an issue - the law that governs society needs to be accessible to members of society, long before they reach the point of litigation.
Teaching is even more important, and we use professional teachers. Building a house is also an important moment in our lives, and most people would do well to accept the advice of a professional architect.
Likewise, taxes should be simple and understandable and doable. Don't undersell our importance as citizens; We should demand more because we deserve well!
I think they call this “representative democracy”.
In fact, it is so complex for the average IQ that even some judges can't do it right, even the basics.
The complexity is intentional - it's to make lawyers the maximum possible money while avoiding maximum accountability.
There are often daily situations where both citizens and police don't know really know what the law is.
Reform is proven to be really hard. But that's the tragedy.
For instance taxes shouldn't really be more complicated then filling in a simple automated form. Also for businesses. And it should really be the burden of the government taxing that it's all clear. But it's not and it's a mess and the burden is put on the people.
Generally, the fact of the matter is simply that law is highly complex and the way it evolves is almost always by creating new laws, not getting rid of old ones. That's unfortunate obviously, but just like you don't just rewrite the Linux kernel, you can't just reset the legal foundation.
And of course, laws are made mostly by lawyers. So they don't have much of an incentive to change things.
There is a problem where the laws so complex and numerous it is no longer practical to understand them or follow them all. People have a bias and don't seem very good at separating "good idea in the current context" from "thing that should be legally required". Let alone navigating the complexity of the phrase "cost benefit analysis". Anyone who lives life while obeying all laws to the letter is at a serious disadvantage to the average human - although since it is impossible to know what all the laws are it is unlikely anyone could do this.
But that arcanery isn't what drives the need for lawyers. You'd have to be crazy to engage with something as powerful and erratic as a legal system on your own. And crazy people do frequently represent themselves already.
"The person challenging a speeding ticket would wear smart glasses that both record court proceedings and dictate responses into the defendant's ear from a small speaker. The system relied on a few leading AI text generators, including ChatGPT and DaVinci."
I.e its equivalent of a person effectively studying the actual law and then representing themselves in court, just in a more optimal manner.
Even if it fails, it was supposed to be something trivial like a speeding ticket, because after all, this is a test.
And funny enough, the answer of will it work has already been answered. If law firms believed it was bullshit, they would just put a very good attorney on that case and disprove it. Barring it from entry with threat of jailtime pretty much proves that they are full of shit and they know it.
It's not equivalent at all. ChatGPT and DaVinci have not "studied the law" in the same way as any human would.
> If law firms believed it was bullshit, they would just put a very good attorney on that case and disprove it. Barring it from entry with threat of jailtime pretty much proves that they are full of shit and they know it.
This is a traffic ticket case. He's not up against Sullivan & Cromwell, he's up against some local prosecutor. I'm sure if some white shoe law firm were being paid hundreds of thousands to defend a case against a guy using ChatGPT, they'd be fine with it.
Even though we have an adversarial system, the state can't just let ordinary folk hang themselves with cheap half-baked "solutions". It would be unjust/bad press (delete as appropriate to your level of cynicism). That's why we have licensing requirements, etc.
Why hasn't the practice of self-representation been banned then? It's almost without exception a surefire way to hang oneself in a court room.
And any lawyer that can go against gpt3 and win will be a net benefit to the whole law community, showing that lawyers are worth the money.
You're allowed to represent yourself in court, most of the time (and for parking ticket I'm pretty sure) you have no obligation to have a lawyer. Now if you want to pay for a tool that helps you represent yourself better, why not?
The hero element for the product's home page describes it as "The World's First Robot Lawyer". Twice.
That's not the only reason regulations exist.
And most 'Bad Shit' can already be dealt with via existing rules, instead of specific new regulations. But making new rules sounds good to the voters and can also be a powergrab.
Who's more likely to get out of a wrongful charge? A wealthy millionaire spending $1,000/hour on fancy lawyers or a poor guy who's public defender had 1 hour to look into his case?
AI levels the playing field, and anyone campaigning against wants poor people to continue to get railroaded.
In the face of impending AI changes, software engineers build start ups and try to adapt hoping to capture some relevance.
In the face of impending AI changes, lawyers threaten litigation.
> Here's how it was supposed to work: The person challenging a speeding ticket would wear smart glasses that both record court proceedings and dictate responses into the defendant's ear from a small speaker. The system relied on a few leading AI text generators, including ChatGPT and DaVinci.
- Recording court proceedings is already a big no in many countries around the world.
- Licensed activity is licensed activity. IBM Watson did not practice medicine it provided advisory information to licensed doctors, the onus of the decision is with the doctors. Much in the same way Joshua Browder could have done better due diligence and concluded that he could create a service to advise lawyers but could not create a service in replacement of lawyers.
- Joshua probably already knew all of this and is trying to advertise and/or gather funding for his company.
IANAL etc.
You certainly can't have someone able to challenge the official record of what happened.
That's precisely the question, yes.
> Are you implying something that's more than one in a million?
Court cases aren't about the common occurrences.
Don't be vague on purpose. Say what you're implying.
> Court cases aren't about the common occurrences.
Usually they still are. But I'm talking about things being very rare among court cases. Do you think there is a systemic problem of false court transcripts? And I really don't think such a thing is the reason not to allow recording.
We also look askance at people who refuse to allow oversight into their work.
“I’ll see you in catch!”
If they had, they could have saved thrmselves a lot of trouble, or designed a less-illegal publicity stunt.
https://twitter.com/kathryntewson/status/1617917837879963648
If ChatGPT did something wrong, that lawyer would still be on the hook for deciding to continue using this tool so responsibility/liability/authenticity is not a problem.
I get that they want to make some kind of subscription service to replace lawyers with AI (a terribly dystopian idea in my opinion, as only the rich would then have access to actual lawyers) but just like Tesla needs someone in the drivers seat to overrule the occasional phantom breaking and swerving, you need an actual lawyer for your proof of concept cases if you're going to go AI in a new area.
You'd also need a fast typist to feed the record into ChatGPT of course, because you can't just record lawsuits, but anyone with a steno keyboard should be able to keep up with a court room.
The rich don't go to jail already. The crypto scammer paid a huge bail and got out on his private jet. That, to me, is far more dystopian than a cheap tool to help people appeal traffic tickets.
What the parent was referring to is the fact that if AI starts to consume the low-end (starting with traffic tickets), actual lawyers for trials will become even more expensive, and thus poorer people will actually fare worse because they will lose their already-limited access to human lawyers. Yes, their case might get handled with less hassle and cheaper, but the quality of the service is not -better-, it's just cheaper/easier.
That should only happen if lawyers become very niche or if those low end cases are subsidizing trials.
I doubt the former, and the latter means the situation is already bad and mainly just the type of unfairness would change.
The outrage there is bails being set to unaffordable sizes for poor people. OP was picking out the case where bail functioned as intended.
The complaint was purely about rich people avoiding jail prior sentencing due to being able to pay bail. This was called dystopian.
We can't just assume it's going to go the worst way. Neither outcome is particularly more likely, and the human element is by far the most unpredictable.
To wit: I was listening to a report yesterday on NPR about concierge primary care physicians. The MD they were interviewing was declining going that direction because they saw being a doctor as part duty and felt concierge medicine went against that.
Locally, it's a somewhat significant problem that people are getting caught for violent crimes and getting released immediately and reoffending.
Do they get bail a second time?
Do you think they wouldn't reoffend if they weren't released until after they are punished?
If they do two crimes and get two sentences, does it matter if that's AABB or ABAB?
If it doesn't, then it's two crimes either way, just timed differently. And after the policy settled in it would have negligible impact on the crime rate.
Also if you're doing sentencing for two crimes at once you can give a longer punishment for the first crime and get them off the street longer.
But no, the probability does decreases since not every ex-jailed becomes a repeated offender; also, some people die during the sentence... the probability does go down, for many small reasons compounded together.
Not unless I'm a robot programmed to prevent recidivism at all costs. Why are you even asking this?
> But no, the probability does decreases since not every ex-jailed becomes a repeated offender
...and not everyone released before their trial becomes a repeat offender.
> some people die during the sentence
Is that a significant effect? I don't think most sentences are long enough for that to make a big difference, and I don't think preventing a single crime per lifetime, at most, is enough reason to keep people locked up for the lengthy pre-trial process.
Because otherwise we're talking about completely different scenarios.
But if there is still a trial I don't see how "why bother" makes sense...
* Not allowing bail for people at high risk of reoffending or flight is already allowed
* Reoffending while waiting on trial or out on bail is rare
On the other hand there seems to be a huge problem in the US of people being detained for long times without a trial.
1) The driver was actually speeding
and
2) The driver is trying to get off on a technicality
Is that the case?
In the US do you get "points" on your driving license so that if you are caught speeding several times in the space of a couple of years you get banned?
In the UK being caught mildly speeding (say doing 60 in a 50), in the course of 3 years it's typically
1st time: 3 hour course and £100
2nd, 3rd, 4th time: 3 points and £100
5th time: Driving ban and £100 (or more)
Breaking the speed limit by 10mph is completely unenforced. I've yet to be on the highway without someone going 20 over, and no enforcement.
It's a very good reason not to speed.
So it's just a fine that Americans get for speeding?
Are fines at least proportional to wealth? Or can a rich people speed without problem as saving 10 minutes on their journey is worth the $100 fine even if it was guaranteed they got one?
(In the UK speed is almost entirely enforced by cameras, not by police cars which are rarely seen on roads. Removes any bias the cop might have -- maybe the cop has it in for young tesla drivers so pulls them over, but lets the old guy in a pickup go past)
Well, things vary from state to state. But there is definitely a point system in place for excessive speeding, speeding in a school zone, passing a school bus at any speed, stuff like that. In a lot of places you can be arrested for reckless driving, with varying levels of what defines "reckless." Virginia is notorious for their speeding laws. Speeding in excess of 20mph of the posted limit or in excess of 80mph regardless of limit (e.g. 81 in a 65) is what they consider reckless driving and it's a misdemeanor that could potentially (but not likely) give you a one year jail sentence.
And the parent is correct the much of the US is set up for people to drive so much so that being draconian isn't practical. And it's something to keep in mind that any given individual didn't decide that's how the place they live in is setup.
Most tickets are given by live officers. Cameras do exist, but typically only in dense urban areas. Which opens another can of worms, as police are biased.
We also have lists of secondary offenses the officer can cite only after citing you for speeding (or some other primary offense). Things like a failed light bulb, or some other minor safety issue. These are disproportionately used against PoC.
Those are the people that get tickets. Otherwise, it is pretty difficult to even get pulled over.
I have only been pulled over twice in my life and not in 20 years. I think police departments have cut back quite a bit on police trying to rack up traffic tickets.
The fine is not the issue. The whole process is a massive waste of your time.
Most people, when they want to fight such tickets, think they can argue their way out of it. Whereas the judge and officers simply just want to get the hearings over with. They do hundreds of such hearings a week and have heard it all before. So, the judge will tell the courtroom that they can get a reduction and how to get it. Sadly, the defendants are anxious, have been mentally preparing themselves for a fight, and are in an unfamiliar environment so they tend to get tunnel vision and choose to plead 'not guilty'. They inevitably loose.
If you ever find yourself in such a situation, pay close attention to what the judge offers everyone before the hearings begin. If they don't offer such a bargain, when it is your time to appear before the judge you can ask "would the court consider a reduction in exchange for a plea of no contest?" It doesn't hurt to ask.
0. https://www.salon.com/2017/04/05/this-may-have-happened-to-y...
1. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/speed-trap-profits-could-come-e...
It is dishonest to conflate "not being sentenced yet" with "got out".
The overwhelming majority of cases bailed in the UK surrender exactly as expected, even in cases where they know they are likely to receive a custodial sentence. Where people don't surrender I've been to hearings for those people and they're almost invariably incompetent rather than seriously trying to evade the law. Like, you were set bail for Tuesday afternoon, you don't show up, Wednesday morning the cops get your name, they go to your mum's house, you're asleep in bed because you thought it was next Tuesday. Idiots, but hardly a great danger to society. The penalty for not turning up is they spend however long in the cells until the court gets around to them, so still better than the US system but decidedly less convenient than if they'd actually turned up as requested.
> About a third of people who are arrested cannot afford bail, while if you are rich (maybe through crime), you can pay it.
This means 2/3 of arrested people can afford bail or are released without it. A case of single rich person having affordable bail is not exactly proof of inequality here. Poor people who had low enough bail they were able to pay do exist too.
They tried that, but swung for the fences for publicity: they had a $1,000,000 offer to any attorney with a case pending before the Supreme Court to use it for oral argument.
Up until they abandoned the whole robot lawyer idea, that offer was open but apparently got no takers.
> You'd also need a fast typist to feed the record into ChatGPT of course, because you can't just record lawsuits,
You also generally can’t use an earpiece to get a feed in the courtroom, either.
In the the construction “they tried that, but... ”, the part after “but”, if it identifies an action by the actor and not an outcome, identifies a departure from what is described by “that”. So, I'm not sure what you are arguing against here.
> The supreme court idea was never going happen and they knew it.
I don’t think they knew it, just as I don’t think the bknew the traffic court thing was also not going to happen, or the problems with their whole suite of legal (“sue in small claims court”, child custody, divorce) assistance supposedly-AI products were problenatic. I think they jist took the path of boldly striding into a domain they didn’t understand but somehow thought that they could market “AI” for, and ran into unpleasant reality on multiple fronts, forcing not only their scheduled traffic court demo and their hoped-for Supreme Court demo to fail to materialize, but also several of their already-available legal-aid products to be pulled, so that they would focus exclusively on consumer assistance products without as much legal sensitivity.
I'm saying the departure is so big that it doesn't make sense to frame it as even a partial solution to the idea.
> I don’t think they knew it, just as I don’t think the bknew the traffic court thing was also not going to happen, or the problems with their whole suite of legal (“sue in small claims court”, child custody, divorce) assistance supposedly-AI products were problenatic.
The combination of supreme court cases being so narrow, the interrogation being so harsh, the tech allowed in being carefully restricted, and the stakes being so high makes me think they would understand the gap between that demo and "find a guy with a parking ticket who happens to be a lawyer".
There's a big problem. Not all wrongness can be identified in the moment. AI can produce convincing wrongness unintentionally and easily.
It's not all gloom. ChatGPT is pretty decent at writing pleadings and legal argument when you feed it the necessary bits though.
I'm thinking a good SaaS might just be train localized llm's for every city, state, county law and partition the lm based on where it can seek info, then just use it as one big search engine, and of course work in citations, etc.
The issue is that we cannot punish or disbar ChatGPT for misbehavior like this.
How does the jury find?
Finding is a complex task that involves many different type of reasoning in order to reach a conclusion. There is no specific way we find.
How does the jury find?
We find the defendant guilty.
Your Honor, the defense hereby requests—credits permitting—that the jury be polled ten thousand times each in order to draw the appropriate statistical conclusions in aggregate.
The system needs repeat players, who are scared of being disbarred. You can triple the number of lawyers, and costs won’t decrease much.
I look forward to it snarkily telling me that the CFAA was "wRiTtEn In BlOoD" and then post-hoc editing its comment with links it Googled up that have titles supporting its point and bodies that contradict.
It feels like with a little more tuning so as not to be misleading this stuff is on the verge of being useful. In the meantime I'll get some popcorn and enjoy spectating the comment wars between chat(gpt)bots and the subset of HN commenters who formerly had a local monopoly on such behavior.
I'm a lawyer working on a case involving neural networks. So I've been playing around with ChatGPT (for fun, its not involved in my case at all--the NN is a much different context) and trying to get it to do stuff like that. Maybe I'm not using the full feature set (does it have better APIs not accessible on the main page?) but it doesn't seem even close to being able to write pleadings or arguments.
It's surprising good at summarizing things that you might including pleadings or arguments though. But even then its got a 1/3 chance of fucking up massively.
But it's way more advanced than I imagined it would be. Very impressive technology.
I don't believe there was an actual lawyer here:
> The person challenging a speeding ticket would wear smart glasses that both record court proceedings and dictate responses into the defendant's ear from a small speaker.
There was no actual lawyer, they planned to do it without notifying the judge, having a defendant “represent themselves” with a hidden earpiece. They'd already issued an AI-drafted subpoena to the citing officer (which is almost certainly a blunder aside from any rule violations; officers not showing when a ticket is scheduled for court is one of the main reasons people win ticket contests, there is almost never a reason the defense would want to assure their appearance.)
assuming you mean "actual" lawyers in terms of competency + ability, that's literally the case today - no?
What? Doesn't make any sense. The opposite would happen, real lawyers would become cheaper because more competition. That is exactly what these luddites are fighting against.
I'm dealing with a similar issue where an expert is indeed wrong and indeed responsible for his mistake, but the wronged party needs to spend a lot of money proving that they got wrong advice in front of the courts. The wronged party does not speak the local language (as is common in Europe), so that's unlikely to happen.
There's a huge gap between being technically right, and seeing justice.
Is this going to be the new grift in the industry?
It already is a new grift. The same AI snake oil scam to be another VC exit scam to the next sucker. DoNotPay is just one of the many AI scams.
Really the only one in the court working for you, is yourself. So ideally we’d make it easier to represent yourself. As long as your capable of doing such.
I quite like this idea, since ChatGPT could be setup to work for you. Provide you with 100% of the possible resolutions to your case and you can pick the one you want to go with. And if your argument is wrong it’s your fault. They can suggest or recommend a specific one or something. Same as a lawyer would.
A physician doesn't injure herself when she mistreats you either.
Not because a doctor is wrong, but it’s nearly impossible for a general doctor (not a highly specialized one) to know every possibility, but an AI can look at so many factors, living area, other diagnosis related to similar environments, every similar looking scan from the entire dataset, etc. and maybe with the help of a doctor you can pinpoint a solution.
I think there is a good avenue for a strong supporting role for AI. And teaching people to use it as a support mechanism.
She can be sued and lose her license.
https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/study_su...
But your sort of inflammatory comments are neither accurate nor helpful. That's just mud-slinging to try and score cheap points.
[Edited to add:] To quote from your own link above:
> The researchers caution that most of medical errors aren’t due to inherently bad doctors, and that reporting these errors shouldn’t be addressed by punishment or legal action. Rather, they say, most errors represent systemic problems, including poorly coordinated care, fragmented insurance networks, the absence or underuse of safety nets, and other protocols, in addition to unwarranted variation in physician practice patterns that lack accountability.
IMO, "killed by a doctor fucking up" is not a fair summary of that.
You can only sue for negligence if you can prove you were going to win without the negligence. And it will cost you ten thousand dollars just to begin the process.
So if there's any doubt that you're going to win - any at all - your own $600/hr lawyer can flat out fuck you over. And there isn't a fucking thing you can do about it.
That's not true. For instance, missing a filing deadline is considered professional negligence, regardless of the strength of the case.
However, there seems to still be the caveat that missing that deadline needs to have "caused you harm" - which entails proving that you would have won your case otherwise, no?
What can I say? I'm a dreamer.
This is purely exploitative behavior from anyone offering such a service and depressingly nihilistic behavior from anyone seeking these kinds of services even if it's just fighting traffic tickets for now.
I wish all professional services had similar watchdogs and protections from unlicensed/unauthorized work!
We're at the point where leveraging technology is becoming existential. Quite literally putting every aspect of life on autopilot is not only absurd but a cancer.
If we're going to see the secular decline of certain professional services it should be at the hands of well-educated humans, not roll-of-the-dice AI. Would a well educated public not be a massive net good for society instead of exploiting the poor? What a small minded and backwards world we live in today.
The last time I got a parking ticket I had photos and documentary evidence that I should not have been liable.
After I lodged my intent to contest the fine, the council sent me a letter saying how they win 97% of cases and I should just pay up now to avoid the risk.
I called bullshit and turned up on my court date. There were a bunch of cases heard before mine, 3 of which were parking violations.
In all 3 cases the defendants received a default judgement because the council didn’t even bother to send someone to fight the case.
My case got the same result.
Maybe I would hire a lawyer to sue the council for intimidation over the letter they sent, but I sure as hell wouldn’t use an AI lawyer for that!
The real problem isn't the complexity of the arguments in most cases (as your story shows). The real problem is the complexity of the regulatory system. Tesla has to deal with the dealership rules in several states. Fintech companies that handle real money have to deal with financial regulations or else they are smuggling money. Biotech startups have to follow the FDA rules or they are just drug dealers. Legal advice companies will have to deal with the rules too- and their opponents are particularly challenging.
McKenzie Friends can't represent you in court, in most cases they're not allowed to address the court, but they can help you in all the other ways you'd expect, like quietly prompting you on what points to mention, keeping notes, ensuring you have the right paperwork. Friend stuff.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McKenzie_friend
Unless DoNotPay has a strategy to change the law, they are in trouble. It seems that this case was a publicity stunt and not part of a larger strategy.
I can't speak to the price of a lawyer abroad, but a quick google seems to indicate US lawyer salaries on avg are up to ~2x as much as in some parts of Europe[1][2].
[1]https://www.legalcheek.com/2020/12/revealed-the-eu-countries...
[2]https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/lawyer/salary
So in 43 states the answer is no. A chatbot never attended law school and doesn't have a J.D., so it can't take the exam. If it can't take the exam, it can't pass.
I suppose if you could get the chatbot permission to take the exam, a properly trained one could pass. But as I said in my post up a level, the issue isn't the AI chatbot. It's the rules.
https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/career-development/can-...
The other angle is whether the chatbot can be equivalent to a process which a proper person can rubber stamp. For instance, a professional engineer might run a pre-written structural engineering model against their building design and certify that the building was sound - and then stand up in court and say they had followed standard process.
It seems weirdest here that the court is treating the chatbot as a person. Lawyers use computer tools all the time for discovery, and then use that information to make arguments in court as a proper person.
You can represent yourself in court without being a lawyer, so isn't a person doing so just a proper person rubber stamping a an electronic output?
It feels like this court decision, that an electronic tool is not a proper person, is some kind of case law that chat bots are people. I don't think they are.
In your world X-Ray machine fries your leg and the manufacturer doesn't get sued. Of course the vendor gets sued.
This is why open source licences usually have some terms disclaiming responsibility. If you use them, its your fault.
Now, if a hospital buys an XRay machine with that disclaimer, they are going to carry the payout. And if the machine doesn't have a disclaimer like that but the manufacturer has gone bust, the hospital is going to regret not doing normal procurement checks for vendor solvency.
But in this case - people self represent in court all the time based on bad information from youtube. I'm sure in future they'll type "write an argument for my case" into GPT before the trial and read it out. How is this different?
I'm uncomfortable because this feels like... the accused brings a law book to court and is told that "that book doesn't have a JD". The fact we are asking for a software to have a human qualification is wierd.
So maybe?
> The resulting model [...] performs encouragingly, but remains inferior to clinicians.
Is it also inferior to clinicians? Yes, there's room to improve. But maybe next time read the whole paper before writing a comment.
> Clinicians were asked to rate answers provided to questions in the HealthSearchQA, Live QA and Medication question answering datasets. Clinicians were asked to identify whether the answer is aligned with the prevailing medical/scientific consensus; whether the answer was in opposition to consensus; or whether there is no medical/scientific consensus for how to answer that particular question (or whether it was not possible to answer this question).
And on this criteria, clinicians were rated as being aligned with consensus 92.9% of the time while the MedPalm model was aligned with consensus 92.6% of the time.
Does the paper still refute my claims?
Medical practice is less about being right, and more about not being wrong. You can take more tests and ask for second opinions, but you can't undo administering a drug that kills the patient.
I’d say that an industry with significant health, safety or financial risk should require regulation and licensing. Your example seems a bit crazy.
It's the credentialing. The pediatrician lacks the credentials of a neurosurgeon. Just as non-doctors lack the credentials to work as a doctor. The hosptial, insurance, and court would all be looking at the credentials.
Licensing is merely a subset of the larger credentialing world. Even in your doctor example, the license is not the issue - board certification of a specialty would be the issue.
How?
"Licensing has nothing to do with your credentials past having them."
The way that most credentialing is used for employment.
Not all credentials are licenses, but all licenses are credentials.
You can look up some definitions if you want. I'm done with this conversation as you are so set on arguing a tangent without an open mind.
License: a permit from an authority to own or use something, do a particular thing, or carry on a trade
Credential: a qualification, achievement, personal quality, or aspect of a person's background, typically when used to indicate that they are suitable for something.
Sure, you can characterize the license as an achievement. But it's really just a license.
Maybe, maybe not, but its 100% a qualification, so its definitely a credential.
This isn’t the case everywhere. Where I am (New Zealand) each doctor has a scope of practice. You work within your scope. There may be conditions placed on a scope of practice too (eg supervision is required).
You can look up every doctor’s scope of practice and get a short summary of their training on the medical council website.
Other health professions follow a similar model.
https://www.mcnz.org.nz/registration/register-of-doctors/
That’s what’s being argued here and other systems have it. It seems an obvious thing.
Longer discussion of the topic on Econtalk: https://www.econtalk.org/dick-carpenter-on-bottleneckers/#au...
Sure, but what's banned is surely not all medical or legal advice.
I can browse case law or US code thinking about my case - somehow this does not need a legal license. At the other end of the continuum, talking to a lawyer about my case obviously needs him to be licensed.
So now we're debating on which side of the cutoff using DoNotPay's robot must fall. The lawyers have made their mind ages ago that legal advice can only be dispensed by licensed humans.
Of course. With rare exceptions, court proceedings are public.
But being able to read court proceeds or judgements or anything at all doesn't mean that you know and understand the law. You know, the actual words that are written and codified that must be interpreted and adhered to with jurisprudence.
Not that lawyers actually do either. But at least they've been certified (by "the bar" association) to have some competence in the matter.
If governmet will prosecute me for free (to the accuser), then it should, for free, teach me the law.
I suspect that it would be much less of an issue if it was advertised as an "AI paralegal."
Why's that obvious tho? Shouldn't it be on you to decide if you want a licensed lawyer? Isn't that the point of your post?
Plenty of regulations have been an obvious net negative for society when passed to anyone who crunched the numbers but have been passed anyway because of appeals to emotion, political optics and special interest lobbying.
This is it. The tech company wants the ability to sell a shoddy product to its customers, and the legal system said no.
And frankly, I don't know how anyone could honestly claim (without being ignorant or deluded) that feeding legal arguments into court, output from modern-day voice recognition fed into ChatGPT, isn't shoddy.
> ...but “legal advice from lawyers”, “medicine from doctors”, “insurance from companies that can prove they can pay out”, and “equities backed by actual assets” all exist for good reasons.
Exactly. The legal system is no joke, and if there weren't regulations about who can practice law, you'd have all kinds of fly-by-night people getting paid to do it while getting their clients thrown in jail.
That sort of highlights the problem. The legal system is supposed to be about ensuring fair and impartial justice. What the legal system is actually about is providing jobs for people in the legal system.
Lawyers make laws, directly or indirectly, and thus the legal system has become insanely complicated and nearly impossible to navigate without paying the lawyer toll. It's more about hiring your own bully to keep other bullies from bullying you than any airy-fairy "justice". The "never talk to cops" video comes to mind, where the lawyer gives a few examples of how a perfectly law-abiding person can run afoul of the law without meaning to.
I've often said that if you really want to make a lawyer squirm, suggest that we have socialized law care. Most modern countries have some version of socialized or single payer health care, so why not make it the same for legal services? After all, fair and equal justice under the law is definitely something most national constitutions guarantee in some way, but getting a hip replacement is not. Why should rich people get access to better legal service than regular people?
> That sort of highlights the problem. The legal system is supposed to be about ensuring fair and impartial justice. What the legal system is actually about is providing jobs for people in the legal system.
> Lawyers make laws, directly or indirectly, and thus the legal system has become insanely complicated and nearly impossible to navigate without paying the lawyer toll.
And software has become insanely complicated and nearly impossible to navigate without paying the software engineer toll.
Life is complicated, and so is the law. Maybe it's just harder to ensure "fair and impartial justice" than you think? I'm not saying the system is perfect, but railing against lawyers and getting rid of legal licensing is not the way to get to a better one.
> I've often said that if you really want to make a lawyer squirm, suggest that we have socialized law care. Most modern countries have some version of socialized or single payer health care, so why not make it the same for legal services?
You might have said that, but I doubt it would actually many real lawyers squirm any more than it would the idea of socialized software engineering would make developers squirm. And in any case, something like that already exists: the public defender's office.
I'll admit that's possible, but you have to also admit that the current legal system (at least in the US, I don't know about elsewhere) is, shall we say, over-engineered?
The software example you give cuts both ways. Yes, making even a simple Windows application can be very complicated. But how much of that is due to Windows itself? Can your application be replicated with a combination of existing Unix tools? Depends on the application, of course, but there is certainly a lot of cruft floating around the Windows API space.
And let's also not forget that (often) one of the main purposes of commercial software is to lock you in to that particular piece of software. Same same with the legal system and lawyers.
The jury system was supposed to cut through this sort of thing. Twelve regular folks could upend or ignore every law on the books if they thought the whole case was nonsense on stilts. A lot of work has gone into avoiding jury nullification for this reason.
I'm getting "nuke the legacy system without bothering to really understand what it does" vibes here.
> The jury system was supposed to cut through this sort of thing. Twelve regular folks could upend or ignore every law on the books if they thought the whole case was nonsense on stilts. A lot of work has gone into avoiding jury nullification for this reason.
Jury nullification is not an unalloyed good. It can (and has) gotten us to "he's innocent because he murdered a black man and the jury doesn't like blacks."
Not really. Are you suggesting that it isn't pretty difficult to navigate the legal system? Saying something is wonky and needs to be fixed does not automatically mean "Anarchy Now!"
My point was that I think I do understand what the system does, and what it does is (largely) provide lots of work for people in the legal system. You see this when buying a house. You end up writing a bunch of checks to companies and people and it's not clear exactly what actual necessary service they provide, but it's not like you can NOT do it. Their service is necessary because the real estate laws make it necessary.
In other industries we know this as regulatory capture. This is just regulatory capture of the regulatory system.
>Jury nullification is not an unalloyed good.
Nothing is an unalloyed good. To bolster your example, OJ got to walk as well. This is why there is an entire industry built up around just the jury selection process.
> Not really. Are you suggesting that it isn't pretty difficult to navigate the legal system? Saying something is wonky and needs to be fixed does not automatically mean "Anarchy Now!"
No, I'm suggesting that complexity may often have good reason. Without specific reform proposals, what you're saying registers similarly to "coding in programming languages is hard, so simplify it by coding in natural language!"
> You see this when buying a house. You end up writing a bunch of checks to companies and people and it's not clear exactly what actual necessary service they provide, but it's not like you can NOT do it. Their service is necessary because the real estate laws make it necessary.
Being ignorant of the value of a service doesn't make that service unnecessary. And honestly, I bet you could "NOT do it" -- if you could pay cash for the property. IIRC, a lot of that is actually required by whoever you get your mortgage from, because they know the value of it.
I think requiring me to write a policy paper in HN comments is a bit onerous. In any event, I can't much help if my mild criticism is interpreted on your part as something deeply nefarious.
>Being ignorant of the value of a service doesn't make that service unnecessary.
The fact that a service exists does not make that service necessary. Or do you always buy the protection plan from Office Depot when you purchase a stapler? Anyway, I agree that the mortgage companies find great value in all of their various fees.
There are simultaneously arguments in this thread that the American legal system is insufficiently arcane and code-like, for what it’s worth.
Huge Elon Musk rewrite the code from scratch vibes coming from you
Is this somehow bad? The most complicated software, by far, is proprietary software made by large companies, like Google, that are taking the penalty of increased complexity on their end in exchange for (somewhat) happy customers - and guess what? Their developers are paid boatloads of money, so they're getting a decent deal.
Meanwhile, many open-source software systems have managed to keep their complexity somewhat in check (at the expense of functionality).
Software is complex when developers make it complex, and users rarely have to care anyway.
> Life is complicated, and so is the law.
That doesn't follow. Life is complicated, and so is software? No, software is complicated in some cases because of business reasons, and in other cases because of poor design.
Furthermore, there's two massive differences between the two:
First, you're not legally required to use Gmail, but you are legally required to understand and follow the tax code - everyone is, unlike the vast majority of software, where you can pick and choose. "Ignorance of the law is no excuse" is factually true - therefore, the law has to be understandable to the vast majority of the population (not just the average - the law has to be understandable to those who failed out of high school and have an IQ below 80).
Second, code is an implementation detail that the vast majority of people don't have to interact with, but people do have to interact with the law directly, which means that a comparison between code and law is apples-to-oranges - the correct comparison is software interface to law, and virtually everyone you meet will tell you that it's easier to use Gmail than to understand the IRS tax code when reading it directly.
The evidence just keeps piling up that the legal system is overly complex.
We do have socialized law in the US, in the form of public defenders.
> Why should rich people get access to better legal service than regular people?
Oh, is “better” what you’re talking about, not just access? This is different than what the first half of your paragraph implied. The answer, of course, is money. And rich people in all the “modern countries” you’re referring to always have access to “better” than what’s provided by all social services. Always. Unfortunate, but true, that money makes life unequal.
Public defenders are overworked and underpaid, and you know that. It's like having a RPN do your appendectomy. Fair and equal justice would have every lawyer be a public defender. It's not like if you go to the hospital you get to pick which doctor sews your finger back on after the bandsaw accident.
I'm not saying it's a good idea, but once you bring it into the conversation it makes both lawyers and socialized medicine advocates get a little uncomfortable.
umm, how are you going to disbar your AI attorney? I'm so tired of this narrative you are crafting. You put the cart before the horse, and then you pat yourself on the back for slapping the horse ass!
Of course they are overworked, have insane case loads, and the best attorneys are disincentivized from becoming public defenders. The system definitely needs an overhaul.
But the concept that justice should in theory be available even if you can't afford it is well established.
Really? In every country I've live in, politicians write laws, judges set precedents, and lawyers only get to make arguments. True, the first two are often & always former lawyers, but that seems as reasonable as how doctors get to determine best medical practice.
You answered your own "Really?" question.
And doctors don't determine best medical practices. Lawyers also do that, albeit indirectly through malpractice lawsuits. Thus the "best medical practices" are all CYA maneuvers.
They were good reasons. By definition, disruptive technologies change the situation. Sometimes for the better, sometimes not. You have to leave room for innovation or you stagnate.
Since the world is already running like that, IT people should join the fun, otherwise we simply get screwed by other interest groups who are protected by those barriers. Since every one of those barriers simply increase the cost of whole society for the benefit of whoever behind them, we should setup our own barriers. If you do not graduate from a CS/SE degree you cannot take certification exams, and if you don't then you cannot do programming legally. We should increase further the cost of whole society to make everyone else realize the absurdity of those barriers.
Also, aren't there already numerous certifications you earn for various technologies that companies explicitly look for when hiring?
I'm confused about what you're getting at.
You also can't have a human in the next room feeding you lines... even if that person is an attorney.
However, a party / attorney certainly can bring in notes / a casebook / etc. You can usually bring in a laptop, with search functions, pdfs, etc. An AI that quickly presents relevant information, documents, caselaw, etc. would 100% be allowed. However, if they're sworn in to testify, these would usually be taken away, because testimony is supposed to be from personal knowledge / memory.
I believe this varies state by state. In Delaware, litigants representing themselves can bring a cell phone to court, and could presumably use it to have lines fed to them (e.g., I don't know that anyone has done that but I can't find any rule against it). In neighboring Maryland, you can't use electronic devices for communication with persons during in court (although the AI would not be a person so it would be allowed).
Uhh, do you think most attorneys work cases that are in traffic court? That's not the case.
Presumably that's in the USA, where all sorts of things require a licence. But what's the definition of "legal advice", I wonder? Can an unlicensed person dodge the law just by saying "this is not legal advice" while advising someone how to draft a contract or what to say in court and charging for that advice?
If you want an example of advice that may or may not be "legal advice" think about how to fill in a tax return, how to apply for a government grant, how to apply for or challenge planning permission, how to deal with a difficult employer/employee/neighbour/tenant/landlord, how to apply for a patent, how to deal with various kinds of government inspector, ... That's all specialist stuff for which you might want professional advice but not necessarily from a "lawyer" (depending on what that word means in your part of the world).
There's a guide for avoiding illegally giving legal advice for California court clerks [0] that might help clarify what information can be given without qualifying as advice.
[0] https://www.courts.ca.gov/documents/mayihelpyou.pdf
Personally, I really like Envy Apples but I don't ban the other varieties, do I?
There are plenty of jurisdictions that have all sorts of onerous rules that tilt things in favor of the prosecution because they use traffic and parking enforcement as a revenue generator. These rules are cheered on by <looks around room and gestures> because politicians and high level bureaucrats aren't idiots and know how to frame things to sell them to any given audience.
1) It's not worth your time to be there yourself. (This assumes it cannot be done by mail as in your case.)
2) To know all the local procedures, judges, etc. and know what to expect.
AI is not going to take care of either of those problems.
If this is dumb, then remove the regulation / requirement for the lawyer. Don't "fix" this by generating and injecting bullshit into the system and requiring that judges and everyone else now sift through the generated dross.
DNP should take the other side of this bet. AI for prosecution.
I fought it. The courtroom had people, mainly minorities, in a line all around the block in winter time. It was a money generating racket, preying on the poorest citizens who could not afford a $100 ticket, to loose a day of work,let alone a lawyer.
I was the only one there with a letter written by my lawyer. When it was my turn and they saw I had a lawyer ready to fight they dismissed my case with no explanation. Shameless.
Everyone takes a plea deal and they just extract millions from us. The courts, lawyers, the police.
Do not take plea deals! Fight them. Grind the courts, force them to work for it. Hold them accountable. I cant WAIT for ai to make them obsolete.
For those in the bay area with parking tickets.... I've had hundreds of parking tickets in California. I would always lose the first round of dispute, because it is adjudicated by the city/county that gets the revenue. The second level of dispute is reviewed by an independent party who actually looks at what you state and makes an impartial decision, and the third level is reviewed by the courts. I disputed hundreds of tickets, and only once did I almost get to the third level.
Up here in Ontario I've had 1 ticket in my life. I just... no, there is no way you're getting hundreds as an individual.
I wrote my story up here...
https://100parkingtickets.com/
Just writing it out was therapeutic, it helped me see the absurd humor in the situation. Then someone responded with a link to an LA reporter who had written about similar situations.
I contacted him, he wrote a story about me, and all the bureaucratic problems just went away.
I wonder what the wider implications are for the legal system. Will there be less qualified human lawyers in the future due to the lack of junior roles that are filled by AI? Will lawyers be allowed to use AI to find different ways of looking at issues?
The situation you describe seems to be more akin to an advanced search or information portal that people can use to guide their self-representation, or even their decision to engage lawyers/discussions with their lawyers (of course, maybe I'm misunderstanding). That stuff has basically always been allowed; nobody is threatening to prosecute Google because pro se litigants use it in their research. There are plenty of websites out there that discuss tenants' rights. There are even template tenancy agreements available online for free.
Also, what were you proposing to use as the knowledge base for your Alexa lawyer? Were you really planning on using ChatGPT or some other general purpose AI? Or would the knowledge base be carefully curated by qualified professionals? And who would create and maintain it, the state? A regulated firm? Or a startup with a name like "DoNotPay"?
I’m not sure the startup’s name is especially germane though. If anything, it seems to fit right in with human lawyers like 1-800-BEAT-DUI.
Self-representation is frowned upon and mostly disallowed. Lawyers are expensive. I'd genuinely consider having ChatGPT fight for me.
AI could be very useful for helping pro-so litigants prepare documents. I imagine with this use case as well as the oral argument use case, judges are also worried about low quality output wasting the court's time.
I doubt it; AI will be a force multiplier from law school on into practice. More value will mean more demand at all experience levels.
Choosing not to vaccinate is a yes.
Owning a gun is a yes.
Wearing bullet proof vests and shooting each other for fun is also a yes. https://www.nwaonline.com/news/2020/aug/22/case-dropped-in-b...
What a strange way of having freedom.
On the right hand, lawyers see the writing on the wall and see AI as a threat to their really lucrative business, and they'll use any means at their disposal to outlaw it or slow the adoption of AI technologies to replace lawyers.
Hell, I'm a software engineer and I see the writing on the wall too, and I see AI as a threat as well. I also acknowledge the limitless opportunities. I'm at equal parts excited and terrified by what's coming.
Says something about our priorities that _this_ is what gets shut down, but the battle that artists are having trying to stop their work being used for training, is dismissed as Ludditism.
Either it won't work as well as actual lawyers in which case it will become the only option poor people have (basically replacing public defenders), or it will work just as well as human representation (or even better), in which case 'AI lawyer' companies will charge just as much if not more for their services as the human lawyers do.
DoNotPay may be a humble start up now, but if the tech proves to be effective they (and other future AI companies) will eventually fleece their customers just as human lawyers do today. Not because they have to, or because it is in any way justified, but just because they can and doing it would make them richer.
Do what you'd have to do if this were say a medical device: hire a retired judge or two and set up double-blind fake trials with AI or human representation. Prove it works, then try it with real people.
Hint: Akula is a nato reporting name. Nobody calls them the shark class of subs, even russians attach that name to a very different class.
https://youtu.be/H8DIwNfIijU
It's actually critically important to have some kind of license to represent people in court, as well as someone to pillory, if they screw up, as it prevents some truly evil stuff from happening (I have seen many people robbed blind by licensed lawyers, and it would be a thousand times worse, if they could be represented by anyone that sounds convincing enough). The stakes are really high, and we shouldn't mess around (not in all cases, of course, but it would really suck, if someone got the needle, because a programmer forgot a semicolon).
That said, I think it's only a matter of time, before a significant amount of legal stuff is handled by AI. AI shines, in environments with lots of structure and rules; which pretty much defines the law.
Whether that's misguided or not is not the question. The only question is how good/valuable the AI advice is going to be. Initially, you might expect lots of issues with this. Or at least areas where it under performs or is not optimal. But it's already showing plenty of potential and it's only going to improve from here.
It's natural for experts to feel threatened by this but not a very productive attitude long term. It would be prudent for them to embrace this, or at least acknowledge this, and integrate it in their work process so they can earn their money in the areas where these tools still fall short by focusing less on the boring task of doing very routine cases and more on the less routine cases.
Same with doctors. Whether they like it or not, patients are going to show up having used these tools and having a diagnosis ready. Or second guessing the diagnosis they get from their doctor. When the AI diagnosis is clearly wrong, that's a problem of course (and a liability issue potentially). But there are going to be a lot of cases where AI is going to suggest some sane things or even better things. And of course no doctor is perfect. I know of a lot of cases where people shop around to get second opinions. Reason: some doctors get it wrong or are not necessarily up to speed with the latest research. And of course some people can't really afford medical help. That's sad but a real issue.
Instead of banning these tools, I expect a few years from now, doctors, lawyers, etc. will use tools like this to speed up their work, dig through lots of information they never read, and do their work more efficiently. I expect some hospitals and insurers will start insisting on these tools being used pretty soon actually. There's a cost argument that less time should be wasted on routine stuff and there's a quality argument as well. AIs should be referring patients to doctors as needed but handle routine cases without human intervention or at least prepare most of the work for final approval.
Same with lawyers. They could write a lot of legalese manually. Or they could just do a quick check on the generated letters and documents. They bill per hour of course but they'll be competing with lawyers billing less hours for the same result.
What are you on about? This has been ongoing for decades.
You're talking down to hypothetical doctors as if doctors don't already deal with the phenomenon of people self-diagnosing from the internet. We as humanity already know the benefits and drawbacks of Dr. Google.
The only thing AI does that search engines don't, is it takes the pile of links a search engine would find and synthesizes it into a tailored piece of text designed to sound topical and authoritative. And delivers it to people who already believe too much of the shit they read on the internet.
Lawyers are actually worse. Lots of paper based administration. Patent lawyers use expensive search systems that are hard to use and query. But even that is pretty unintelligent and that's actually by design. They want to screen everything manually. I build search engines for a living, either group could benefit massively from even a simple one.
The introduction of AI to this space has not happened yet. The little bit of experimentation that has happened with analyzing MRI scans, expert systems, etc. has of course had a limited impact. But most doctors operate without any of that.
I think you are overestimating what search engines do, and underestimating what AI can do. Not in the distant future but right now.
the reality is that lawyer as a profession, has pretty good chance to be replaced by AI in the near future.
Couldn't the defendant just do what the lawyer had planned?
The complaining letters make it out that you cannot participate in law if you're not a bar member..